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WILLIAM A. CRAWFORD-FROST, M. A 



The 
Philosophy of Integration 

AN EXPLANATION 

OF THE 

vND OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



By 

Rev. William A. Crawford-Frost, M. A. 

Rector of the Memorial Church of the Holy Comforter, Baltimore, Md. 

1896/0 1903 ; Instructor of Chemistry in the Baltimore Medical 

College; Member of the Society of Arts, England, Etc. 



Edited by 

James Wilson Bright, Ph.D. 

mm of English Philology, John's Hopkins University; Hon 

Secretary for America of Chaucer Society ; President, 1902-3. 

Modem Language Association of America, Etc.. Etc. 



iyoo 
WAY HEW PUBLISHING OOMPANTJ 

Boston, Maps. 




WFORD-FROST, M. A 



The 
Philosophy of Integration 

AN EXPLANATION 

OF THE 

UNIVERSE AND OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



By 

Rev. William A. Crawford-Frost, M. A. 

Reclor of the Memorial Church of the Holy Cow farter, Baltimore, Md. 

1896/0 1903 ; Instructor of Chemistry in the Baltimore Medical 

College; Member of the Society of Arts, England, Etc. 



Edited by 

James Wilson Bright, Ph.D. 

Professor of English Philology, John's Hopkins University ; Hon. 

Secretary for America of Chaucer Society ; President, 1902-3, 

Modem Language Association of America, Etc., Etc. 



iyoo 

MAYHEW publishing company 

Boston, Mass. 






6 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

'JAix 27 1906 

* Copyright Entry 
CLASS CC XXC, No. 
COPY B. 



7 






Copyrighted, 1906. 
W. A. Crawford-Frost, M. A. 

All rights reserved. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 



I. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Creation, Gov- 
ernment and Destiny of the Uni- 
verse i 

II. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Incarnation of 
God in Jesus Christ. . . .28 

III. The Philosophy of Integration as 

Explanatory of the Miracles of 
Christ 37 

IV. The Philosophy of Integration as 

Set Forth in the Teachings of 

Christ 69 

V. The Temporary Triumph of the Dis- 
integrator in the Sufferings and 

Death of Christ 93 

VI. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Place of De- 
parted Spirits, and of the Spirit- 
ual Environment of Man. . .109 
VII. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Resurrection 
and Ascension of Christ. . .128 
VIII. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Phenomena of 
Pentecost and the Work of the 
Holy Ghost 143 



TABLE OF CONTENTS— continued 



PAGE 



IX. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Organization 
and Aims of the Christian Church. 152 
X. The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Communion of 
Saints and the Remission of Sins by 
the Universal Integrator. . .160 

XL The Philosophy of Integration as 
Explanatory of the Final Destiny 
of Man. 170 



P REFA CE. 



The system of thought to which I have given the 
name "Philosophy of Integration" resembles, on the 
one hand, the Idealistic Philosophy of Hegel, and on 
the other, the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer; 
but it differs from either, 'or both, as a child differs 
fr«m its parents. It was first made public in a paper 
read before the Br#«klyn Clerical League, in 1895, an d 
published^in outline, in 1896, under the title " Old 
Dogma in a New Light" for the facts in the life of 
Christ I have gone chiefly to the Bible itself, but have 
also made use of the works of Pearson, Blunt, Liddon, 
Westcott, Farrar and others, whose assistance I 
gratefully acknowledge. 

William A. Crawford-Frost. 

Baltimore, 
1906. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF 
THE CREATION, GOVERNMENT, AND DESTINY OF THE 
UNIVERSE. 

Mr. Edward Clodd and his friend, the late Mr. 
Grant Allen, agreed upon the following definitions of 
the terms " Power", "Force", and "Energy": 

"Power. Motion throughout the universe is pro- 
duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or 
lessened by two indestructible powers of opposite 
nature to each other, (a) Force and (b) Energy. 

Force is that which produces or quickens motions 
binding together two or more particles of ponderable 
matter, and which retards or resists motions tending to 
separate such particles. 

Energy is that which produces or quickens motions 
separating, and which resists or retards motions bind- 
ing together, two or more particles of matter, or of the 
ethereal medium." * 

Taking these terms in the sense here used, we shall 
proceed upon the hypothesis that force is only a name 
for the working of God, the Unifier and Preserver, 
the Integrator, in the universe, and that energy is a 
name for the working of His opposite, the Evil Spirit, 
the Destroyer and Disintegrator, the person represented 

♦Edward Clodd, "The Story of Creation", New York, Humbolt 
Publishing Co., 1888, p. 7. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

to us in the Scriptures not as an everlasting being like 
God but as a fallen angel, one having a temporal and 
not an eternal existence. 

By force we mean that which integrates and con- 
structs. By energy that which disintegrates and de- 
stroys. To say that force is God is not to say that 
God is mere force. All force may be God, and only 
some of God force; and that in Him which transcends 
it may contain His personality. 

This accords with the conflict, observed in nature, 
between the creating and preserving force of unity on 
the one hand, showing itself in the three forms of 
chemical amnity, molecular cohesion and gravitation, 
and, on the other hand, the disintegrating energy of 
diversity, showing itself in the threefold form of,(i) light 
which causes, especially, disintegration of atomic or 
chemical union; (2) heat, which antagonizes, especially, 
molecular cohesion, and (3) electrical repulsion, which 
combats especially the gravitation of bodies. But 
chemical amnity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation are 
three forms of the same force; and light, heat, and 
electricity are not only one but also transmutable. 

Instead of reducing God to mere force, let us regard 
this trinity in unity, of chemical amnity, molecular 
cohesion, and gravitation, as a mode of God's working. 
As He really is in Heaven, He may be without body, 
parts, or passions; but as He manifests Himself to 
us on the earth, He may appear to have all these. 
He shows Himself to us as force in the natural world. 

For man we have the threefold manifestation of 
God's working as beauty, goodness, and truth, a 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

harmonizing trinity, together with the disintegrating 
trinity of ugliness, evil and error, which are the work of 
the Devil. The origin of evil is, therefore, a question 
inside a wider problem, which embraces also ugliness 
and error, viz., the problem of the origin and nature of 
the Devil. Our contention is that the Devil is 
God's own limitation and relaxation of Himself. He 
is God's servant, and is allowed for God's own pre- 
ordained purpose a succession of temporary triumphs. 
In reality God is Absolute Unity, In Him is no 
" variableness or shadow of turning." Yet He has 
chosen to relax Himself into the Becoming by a con- 
flict with a part of Himself, which is a mere negation 
of Himself. The Devil is not a real person but only 
an apparent or actual one. By actuality we mean the 
universe as we see it. By reality we signify the universe 
as God sees it to be in its true nature. The Devil is thus 
a foil for the attributes of an All-Wise and Beneficent 
Creator. 

We are in the era of the gradual, but continuous, 
triumph of unity. When all the atoms in the universe 
are brought together into a solid, absolutely cold, 
homogeneous mass, our era will have ended, and the 
Destroyer will be annihilated, and there may begin the 
gradual triumph of separation which will end only 
when all the elements are distributed again throughout 
space into an imponderable, invisible, and altogether 
imperceptible ether, every atom of which, even though 
it be divided to nothingness, so far as our powers of 
apprehension are concerned, will be a partial incarna- 
tion of both God and Satan. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

All the heavenly bodies appear to be governed by 
fixed laws. Their movements are systematic. Hitherto 
we have not been able to fathom the secret of their 
actions. Condensation of nebulous matter into suns, 
and thence into planets, and thence into frozen satellites, 
such as our moon, we observe, by scientific methods ; 
and may we not legitimately infer, by analogy, that 
just as the motion of the moon is regulated by our earth, 
and that of the earth by our sun, so our sun with its 
whole system is governed by a still larger sun, which 
in turn takes its direction from a greater, and so onward 
till there is reached a central sphere which regulates all 
the stars, planets, nebulous matter, and ethereal 
media in the universe ? Further, what is there incon- 
sistent, either with science or revelation, in our regarding 
this central sphere as the Heaven of the theologians 
and the abode of God's absolute self- consciousness or 
personality ? Even as my mind exceeds and transcends 
my body, so God's mind exceeds and transcends the 
material universe. Just as the motions of my body are 
worked from the co-ordinating centre in my brain, so 
the motions of the material universe may be worked 
from the centre of His personality, which orthodox 
Christians locate in a place called Heaven. There 
only may dwell beauty, goodness, and truth in infinite 
perfection. On our distant little earth the atoms are 
partially conscious of their Godhead or devilhood, 
and beauty, goodness, and truth are slowly working 
their way Heavenward into recognition. 

Spectrum analysis shows us that nebulous masses are 
composed of some of the same elements that make up 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

our earth; and though we have not succeeded in re- 
ducing our seventy-odd elementary atoms to one 
universal substance, we have observed in them certain 
rythmic inner laws from which we not unfairly infer 
that their differences may be merely quantitative, 
and that they may in reality be one. The nebulous 
mass is a condensation of the infinitely rare distribution 
of these atoms. To us it appears as creation out of 
nothing by the deliberate design of an all-powerful God 
who manifests Himself as the great condenser and 
integrator. It appears as the creation out of nothing 
because it is beyond the sensuous apprehension or 
rational conception of man . The Christian believes 
in the omnipresence of God, nominally, but usually 
shrinks from admitting that God is in stones and trees. 
If we are to escape the unsatisfactory hypothesis of 
blind necessity, we must believe that God and Satan fill 
every atom of the nebulous mass that condenses 
into a planet, and that it so condenses by the triumph 
of God over Satan. Although no atom can contain 
the whole of God, yet the two, God and Satan, are in 
each atom of our earth. Life is that which holds atoms 
together; death is that which disintegrates them. As 
integration is evolved, life is developed into recognizable 
forms, and begins to manifest its gradual triumph over 
death. All that is is alive. There is no such reality as 
inorganic nature. Rocks live. Their atoms have enough 
subconsciousness to enable them to combine with acids, 
or what not, by that which we call chemical affinity. 
Dead things are merely those of which the form of life 
is too minute for our cognizance. Everything in the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

universe knows enough to do that which it does, and 
everything does something, if it be only to hold together 
and be itself. The subconsciousness of the atoms 
cohering in a piece of chalk is a different kind of con- 
sciousness from that of man. A difference of degree 
becomes a difference in kind. When we deny the 
subconsciousness of the atoms, we do not mean to 
assert that they do not know enough to cohere. We 
only mean that they do not know that they know. 

After the nebulous mass had condensed into a sun 
and the sun had contracted into our earth, that which 
we would call life became manifest. In the misty 
oceans that had been precipitated from the integrat- 
ing elements of the atmosphere teemed monera, and 
amoebae, and other little-differentiated organisms. This 
was not the creation of life from the lifeless, but simply 
the evolution of a form of life too fine to be recognized 
by us into a form that comes within our ken. Passing 
over ages of the continued struggle of God with Satan, 
of the constructing force with the destroying energy, we 
find that God has, in spite of Satan, at last made for 
Himself a machine called the human brain, in which He 
and Satan, as on a battle ground, contend to make good- 
ness and wickedness, respectively, prevail. We have 
no right to assume that our thought is in our brains. 
When one considers the number of ideas that are 
recorded in the mind of a man of eighty, recollections 
extending back to childhood, one is inclined to be- 
lieve that if there were retained in the brain a 
separate impression, or material change, corresponding 
to each thought, it would require a larger organ than 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

our brain to hold these impressions; and it appears far 
more conceivable that our thoughts are stored in our 
spiritual environment, which uses our brains to make 
itself manifest, just as electricity makes itself known in 
an electric machine. There is a little universe of living 
beings in the end of my finger. I examine its parts 
with the microscope, and I see the blood corpuscles 
and the minute cells. I can control this little world. 
I can cause violent motion of its inhabitants by 
warmth, or stagnation and apathy by cold. I can put 
my finger in the fire and disperse its atoms to apparent 
nothingness. I can put a ring around it and cause it to 
decay by defective supply of living organisms. It is a 
part of my body. So far as freedom is concerned, what 
it is to me our world is to God. In regard to government, 
what the personality of the blood corpuscle is to my 
personality, my personality is to God's. Each atom 
knows enough to do what I make it do. Each man knows 
enough to do what God makes him do. Yet each atom 
in the nerve, bone, blood, or muscle, is free to follow 
the laws of its own nature. It attracts or repels just 
what suits its purpose, and it builds or destroys, moves 
or stops, grows or decays, in accordance with its own 
free nature. Though I can control it, I cannot make it 
untrue to itself, because its true self is its Godhead. 
Its life is the life of God who inspires all things, not 
only men, but earth and rocks and trees and all that is. 
The omnipresent God may be a truly personal God as 
St. Paul understood. Theologians are oftentimes led to 
deny God's immanence in the material, through their 
anxiety to assert His transcendence of it. When one 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

denies either, he falls into error. God is both immanent 
and transcendent. To say that man is part of God, 
that some of God is man, is not to say that God and 
man are merged in each other, or even that man is 
actually merged in God, for, evidently, God wishes that 
portion of Himself which I call myself to be regarded 
by me as a free and independent personal agent, and 
therefore I rightly look upon myself as such, yet, at 
the same time, as God sees me, I may be but a tiny 
atom or corpuscle of His Infinite being. 

Let us express our conclusions categorically: 
(i) Force is God. The unifying and integrating 
cause at work moulding nature is part of God, or a mani- 
festation of His power. 

(2) Energy is the activity of the Devil. The dis- 
integrating and destroying cause at work separating 
atoms, loosening molecules, and repelling bodies from 
each other, is a manifestation of God's self-relaxation 
whom we call Satan. 

(3) Inertia is not a property of matter but merely a 
deadlock between God and Satan. A clod of earth is 
inert. If God chose further to triumph over Satan in 
it, there would be condensation of it. If Satan could 
get a sufficient reinforcement in the shape of heat, and 
so gain a temporary triumph over God, it would expand 
and disintegrate. The inertia remains in the clod so 
long as neither God nor Satan triumphs in it. 

(4) The Devil, though an actual person, is not a 
reality but only a temporary and voluntary relaxation 
of unifying force. God, who alone really is in the 
universe, is positive and absolute unity. Heat and light 

8 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

are not realities but merely relaxations of cold and 
darkness. 

(5) Heaven is a sphere, probably central, from which 
God regulates the motions of all the ethereal media, neb- 
ulous matter, suns, planets, and moons in the universe. 

(6) The history of the universe is a succession of 
windings and unwindings. We are in an age of winding 
or condensation. Our era began when the whole uni- 
verse was distributed throughout space in an imponder- 
able, invisible, inaudible, and altogether imperceptible 
ether, which nevertheless contained in itself potentially 
all the elements or atoms we know on the earth. 
This is for us the nearest conceivable approach to 
nothingness. It is for man actual nothingness, though 
for God it is everything in potentiality. At this period 
God's self- relaxation has reached its climax of triumph 
over His unifying impulse. He now begins to conquer 
His self- relaxation. The impulse to relax yet exists in 
every atom but it is relatively weaker than the impulse 
to condense. The result is that a nebulous mass forms 
at the centre. It condenses into a sun, thence into a 
planet, thence into a moon, thence into a substance which 
cannot be definitely described by us because we have 
had no experience of it in nature but which we call the 
absolutely solid oneness or universal substance. This 
is Heaven. But in the meantime, under fixed laws and 
at regular intervals, God has triumphed over His self- 
relaxation all through the universe and formed nebulous 
masses and suns and planets. One by one these con- 
dense and draw nearer the centre. Yet self-relaxatio n 
makes a hard struggle and the process is exceedingly 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

slow. Each expansion is smaller than the last, and. 
when all tter in the universe is a perfect solid, 

our era will have ended. 

- The theory of Evolution can best be understood 
by supposing that the plane:- arc ::osely related to 
each other chronologically and causatively in the order 
of their condensation, and that we once lived on the 
moon and have come to tl ::ch had hitherto 

been the moon's sun, then a spherical "lake of fii 
and that we, being one spirit, thosefe incarnate ourselves 
in our earth's fiery elements, there to evolve into amoebae. 
rsr.es. reptiles, quadrupeds, and men. It was a fall 
bom a state of limited purity* into another world of 
but "■ re should emerge from that conflict witl 

ity, goodness, and truth; s 
the earth, through Christ, directly :: the Denter, and the 
rest, united in one spirit, should in turn go to our sun 
and, though there Dondemned :: anevol 
invohing perpetual pair., should attain one step ne 
Heaven. It was the ye arning : : : higher knowledge that 
God used in that one spirit bo fulfil His judgment upon 
him, that he -for this sriri: is the person whc is alle- 
gorically presented to us in God's Word as Ai 
should leave a home of deathless purity in the moon 
and choose to incarnate Himself in our earth so that 
out of the continued struggle there he might get ne a 
God. It was the yearning of a pan of God to : 
to the centre of His personality. The story >f Adam 
and Eve as given in the Bible may have been intended 
by God to present to the unfolding rnind of man the 
truth that originally his state had been one of purity 



: : 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and goodness but that through his desire for wider 
knowledge he had chosen to fall from his high position. 
Like a great part of the Bible its full meaning was 
probably beyond the grasp of the person inspired to 
write it. There is always an underlying element of 
Divine, unifying, and connected truth, running through- 
out the books included in the canon, which, notwith- 
standing its inward infallibility, is overlaid by a mass of 
human misconceptions. Objectively, the revelation, by 
virtue of its internal infallibility, is a perfect one. Sub- 
jectively, there will be a growth of power in the Catholic 
or Universal Church to separate the eternal underlying 
truth from the temporal and fallible human channel 
which conveyed it. It will be only when we have 
reached Heaven, and read the plan of salvation back- 
ward, that the Bible will be a perfect subjective revela- 
tion. Whether written by Moses, or by Ezra, or by some 
contemporary of the latter after the return from exile; 
whether suggested directly to the mind of the writer, 
or discovered in some ancient Hebrew document, or de- 
rived from a Babylonian myth, this story of Adam stands 
at the beginning of the book which for many centuries 
has claimed to be a revelation of the creation, redemp- 
tion, and destiny of man, and which to-day is more 
studied and believed than when it was first compiled. 
To one who is assured that nothing happens by chance 
this must appear a truth of eternal cosmic significance, 
pre-established before the foundation of the world, this 
tradition of a fall from a state of purity, this theory of 
a gradual elevation and restoration to a higher per- 
fection. It is in harmonv with observed facts in our 



ii 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

human experience. It accounts for the presence of 
ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which never 
leave men in peace so long as they dwell in ugliness, 
wickedness, or ignorance. It explains our constant 
dissatisfaction with the imperfect present, our longings 
for loveliness, purity, and wisdom. Since the time of 
Plato men have possessed, more or less clearly, the 
belief in a former existence of the soul. To assert that 
our life hereafter is eternal, but that it began with our 
birth, is to predicate eternity with one end. Men ex- 
perience certain transient flashes, or intuitions of the 
human mind, which seem to be recollections of our 
former state. The most familiar of these is the feeling 
one has of having seen before a landscape, a book, a 
person, and of noticing that the next two or three 
thoughts, or incidents, fit into the fleeting recollection 
of a previous scene. No satisf acton* psychological solu- 
tion of this problem can be given, although it has been 
sought in such a phenomenon as that of the successive 
action of the two hemispheres of the brain, the explana- 
tion being that when the slower half of the brain per- 
ceives the picture, the mind recollects the impression on 
the quicker hemisphere and mistakes the brief interval 
between them for the lapse of an indefinite time. But we 
have the same feeling sometimes in the case of words 
that we hear spoken, and even of thoughts that arise 
from internal suggestion. Therefore we are obliged 
to fall back upon the reality of our pre-existence. That 
alone satisfactorily accounts for intuitive ideas, and 
for the inner motives and underlying realities of which 
the outward acts of individuals or the histories of nations 



12 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

are but the external and mechanical manifestations. 
If, from all of these independent trains of thought, we 
accept the inference, not capable of logical proof, that 
we have lived somewhere previous to our present life on 
the earth, have we anything to indicate the probable 
whereabouts of our former abode? It may, of course, 
have been in the souls of our ancestors, or a previous 
incarnation, but water cannot rise above its level, and 
we find ourselves with ideals that are higher than any 
our ancestors could have had, inasmuch as the race has 
been ascending in beauty, goodness, and truth from the 
beginning and still continues its progress. Our previous 
life may have been on some of the other planets, but 
none of these seems to have any direct connection with, 
or relation to, our earth. There are the far-distant 
solar systems, but we cannot perceive that we have any 
immediate connection with them. On the other hand, 
we perceive a relationship, as it were in a straight line, 
direct and somewhat intelligible, between our moon and 
the earth, and our earth and the sun. If we believe 
that we have once lived on any of the visible heavenly 
bodies, and that after this life we will go to live on 
another of them, the great weight of inference will be in 
favor of the moon and the sun, between which our earth 
is a sort of intermediary. It is true we must have lived 
originally on the central sphere whence everything that 
is has expanded, but that must have been many stages 
before our life here, else probably we would have remem- 
bered more of it, being, upon that hypothesis, only one 
remove from infinite knowledge. Herein is the great 
difference between the Christ and other men. The ques- 



13 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

tion then arises, Which way are we probably going ? 
May we not have come from the sun and be on our way 
to the moon ? We reply that this view is opposed by 
what we know of the sun and moon and of the nature of 
things on the earth. On our planet we find that prog- 
ress means condensation; that integration is the secret 
of evolution. We know that the earth is growing colder 
year by year; and though the short period of human 
history and tradition is not sufficient to give us a very 
clear idea of the rate of progress, as it is so tiny a fraction 
of even our planet's life, yet the variations we perceive 
within our little period of consciousness are enough to 
establish the gradual triumph of unity. Let us turn now 
to the moon. The moon is a worn-out world whereas the 
sun is a new one. The moon represents the victory of 
darkness over light, of cold over heat, of contraction over 
expansion, of force over energy, of God over the Devil. 
We see on her frozen surface mountains and valleys, 
extinct volcanoes, silent and dark. We have no right 
to infer that the moon has ceased to grow cold. We 
know very little of what cold really is. When matter 
becomes heated beyond a certain point it may pass 
out of all forms recognizable by man, and when it be- 
comes frozen below a certain point may its constitution 
not become such that it would require beings endowed 
differently from us to perceive it at all ? The moon may 
get colder and colder until it will not even reflect the 
rays of the sun, which may have been the fate of all 
the moon's moons, if there were any. On our moon we 
see the end of the process that is now taking place on 
our earth. We know that human beings like ourselves 



14 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

could not live on such a cold sphere. If we believe that 
at one time it has been warmer and inhabited, should 
we believe that its inhabitants were entirely annihilated ? 
Is it not more in harmony with science to believe that 
as life is an entity, and that as anything that is cannot 
be destroyed, so life may be changed but cannot be 
destroyed, and therefore that those who lived on the 
moon when it was warmer must have gone, or been 
transferred, from the moon to some other heavenly 
body? And which of these bodies would be so avail- 
able as our earth, which even now attracts the moon to 
itself with all that is in or on it ? What supposition is 
more natural, a priori, therefore, than that, if our life 
has come from any Heavenly body, the moon is that 
body? 

(8) According to the theory of the triumph of unity 
or condensation, the next abode of some of the earth's 
inhabitants should be the sun. We recognize that the 
moon is kept in its place by the exact adjustment of 
energy and force, the one tending to throw it off into 
space and the other to draw it to the earth. We see 
further that our planet is kept in its orbit by the dead- 
lock of the same two enemies, one of which would draw 
it to the sun. But who raises the question as to what 
keeps the sun in its place ? If it appeared to be the 
center of the universe, we might understand that it 
could be kept still by the tension of all parts of the uni- 
versal sphere towards itself. We know, however, that 
it is only one amongst myriads of larger suns, and that 
therefore it appears dependent upon the attraction of 
some other body or bodies for its fixity of position. The 



15 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

5 un may not at present be circulating around its regulat- 
ing sun : but, if this be true, we should expect it to do so at 
some future time. It is a si gnificant fact that our whole 

solar system has been declared I -.omers to be 

moving toward a point in the milky way. By the pro- 
less of condensation, when the sun has cooled down 
into a planet, and our earth and our planets have become 
shrivelled into little moons, and the moons have become 
frozen and oontracted beyond recognition, then the sun 
D probably have been drawn so near to its immediate 
llatoi as ro be obliged to move around it, if if is 
not doing so already. Let 'as not lose sight of the fact 
that it is by the gradual triumph of God over Satan that 
this will be accomplished. The centrifuge energy is 
Satan. The centripetal force is God. The leader may 
think we have proceeded too quickly. "How do you 
know ?? , he may ask, "that our sun is condensing into 
a planet ?" To this we reply : 

(a) We behold nebulous masses, which,, the spectrum 
shows us, ;: re .imposed of many of the same elements 
that now make up our earth. 

(b) By the laws of chemical a ffin ity, molecular ::- 
hesHffl, and gravitation, the atoms in these nebulous 
clouds would be likely to combine into molecules, the 
molecules to cohere in bodies, or patches, and the bodies 
to gravitate towards each other. 

r Hence :aerr would be motion towards the centre 
of the nebulous mass. 

i A: the centre where these motions would end, an 
amount of heat would be generated that would exactly 
correspond to the amount of morion destroyed there. 

16 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(e) By an argument a priori, therefore, we would ex- 
pect to find a fiery central mass with a cold atmosphere 
pressing towards its centre, and containing the same 
atoms with which we are already familiar. 

(/) Our latest discoveries by photography of the sun 
and spectrum analysis have plainly verified our a priori 
conclusions. It is now clear that the rice-grained ap- 
pearance of the sun is due to the flaming points of burn- 
ing hydrogen bursting out from the centre of the fiery 
mass, and that the sun spots are immense funnel-shaped 
openings leading in towards the centre of the sun and 
caused by the rushing down of the cold atmosphere; and, 
although we have not yet discovered all of our atoms 
or elements in the sun, we have found so many that we 
can fairly infer the presence of the others. 

(g) As a final proof, we see in our solar system some 
bodies which are in the transitional period between the 
sun state and the planet state, and they are those 
that appear to be surrounded by the largest number 
of moons or bodies which are half planet and half moon. 
Jupiter, whose bulk is 1400 times that of the earth, has 
so small a density that its mass is only 338 times 
greater than that of the earth, and it exhibits phenom- 
ena of belts, and has four moons. Saturn, whose bulk 
is 735 times greater than the earth and only 100 times 
greater in mass, exhibits the phenomena of belts and 
also of concentric rings, and has eight moons. Can- 
not the significance of this be easily seen? Saturn 
appears more sun than planet; Jupiter half sun and half 
planet; our earth a planet with one moon left; Mercury, 
Venus, and Mars planets that have lost all or some of 



17 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

their moons. The planetoids or asteroids which have 
been discovered within the last century may be the 
lost moons of these planets. 

(9) According to this centralization theory of creation, 
Heaven, our final home, must be an absolutely cold, 
dark, and magnetic sphere which attracts everything 
that is to itself. The darkness and coldness of Heaven 
are, of course, opposed to the popular conception 
thereof, and also to what has hitherto been the opinion 
of scientists. Scholars, however, must soon learn that 
cold, darkness, and magnetic attraction are attributes 
of reality and that light, heat, and electrical repulsion 
are merely negative motions. 

It will be hard to convince the many that material 
light is a principle of evil, because all through the ages 
it has been held to be a distinctive attribute of the good 
and creative force. It was so regarded by the specula- 
tive cosmogonies and theosophies of Oriental nations ; 
and even the language of Holy Writ is tinctured with 
the conception that light is pre-eminently the attribute 
of God, and darkness that of the Devil. Reflection may 
perhaps show us, nevertheless, that the popular con- 
ception is as false as was the supposed flatness of the 
earth, and that, as in the latter case so in the former, the 
language of the Scriptures must be regarded as spoken 
to men in popular and understandable form rather 
than in that which is scientific and accurate. With regard 
to heat there will not be so great difficulty, though 
scientifically, light and heat are supposed to be the same 
thing, namely, undulations of greater or less length, 
tension, or frequency. Yet the public has been so 

18 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

accustomed to think of Hell as a place of everlasting 
burning that it will be rather predisposed to predicate 
heat as an attribute of the Devil's working, though very 
loath to admit the same thing of light. Yet light is ex- 
tremely painful under certain circumstances. Some 
barbarous nations, as a means of torture, cut off the 
eyelids of victims. Invalids who suffer from insomnia 
find light distressing and require their windows dark- 
ened in the daytime. One cannot sleep soundly in a 
lighted room. There is something in the nature of 
light that causes unrest, motion, struggle. 

Darkness alone is fully adapted to rest. It is in keep- 
ing with this thought that Heaven, being a place of ab- 
solute and blissful, though not, of course, unconscious, 
repose, should have in it no such thing as material light. 
Being a condition necessary to human vision and 
the perception of external objects and consequently 
necessary for the acquisition of a great part of our knowl- 
edge, light has come to be used as synonymous with 
knowledge. But a condition necessary to the existence 
of a thing must not be confounded with the thing itself 
nor always regarded as the cause of it. The light is not 
knowledge any more than the eye itself is knowledge, nor 
is it the cause of knowledge. All that the light does 
is to enable certain disconnected, incoherent, and dis- 
integrating impressions to fall upon the retina. It is 
the understanding, or the innate unifying and discrim- 
inating function supplied by the mind itself, that 
seizes these isolated sense impressions and unites them 
into a concept, or intelligible notion, of an object. In 
other words light is an element necessary to the per- 



19 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

ception of a visible object just as a knowledge oi evil is 
necessary to the perception of good, but the knowledge 
of evil is not therefore the cause of the perception of 
good, nor, above all, should it be looked upon as itself 
good. Neither should light be considered a cause of 
knowledge or confused with knowledge itself. Light 
is a form of motion necessary to the perception of a 
visible object, but it gives man only a chaotic assem- 
blage of unintelligible, isolated impressions that would 
but serve to make perception impossible, did not the 
integrating God overrule this anarchy and make orderly 
conceptions and knowledge out of it. It is easy to 
imagine higher forms of existence in which our knowl- 
edge will not be conditioned by sense perceptions at 
all or, if so, will be not limited to the perception of ob- 
jects by these poor eyes of ours, which require physical 
light to see but which do not at best see things as they 
are, for when we supplement their power by telescopes 
and microscopes we see wider and deeper into the con- 
stitution of things. Can we imagine our state of in- 
finite knowledge in Heaven limited and hampered by 
our present weak and imperfect organs of vision ? Shall 
we have the same false powers of perception, or shall 
we not have faculties that see things as they are? If 
then we are not to be hampered with our present limited 
and untrustworthy vision when we reach Heaven, why 
should we there need material light, which is necessary 
only for those imperfect powers ? Material light should 
not be confounded with spiritual illumination. 

Serious doubts may arise in the minds of many from 
the numerous and direct references in the Scriptures, 



20 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

especially in the Gospel of St. John, to Christ as the 
"Light of the World", and it requires a violent wrench 
from the ordinary conception to accept our hypothesis. 
How can we reconcile it, for example, to such a state- 
ment as "In Him was light and the light was the life of 
men." To this we reply that at the time these words 
were written and, indeed, up till the present, light was 
regarded as a cause of fertility, growth, and vitality in 
the organic world. It is easy to account for such an 
idea. Plants will not grow without light. Therefore 
it is an obvious, but not necessarily a correct, inference 
that the light causes the plant to grow. Again, since 
light is a necessary condition of all visual per- 
ception, one is inclined to affirm that light is a 
source of knowledge. These ideas have become so 
associated in our minds that we can hardly express the 
imparting of knowledge without employing the figure 
of enlightening or illuminating. Throughout the 
Bible, and in our Lord's own discourses, words are used 
in their simple popular sense, to convey ideas which 
can be understood by the people to whom they were 
written or spoken. It is in this sense that St. John 
speaks of Christ as the light of the world. He was the 
source of truth and the cause of all spiritual vitality. 

As to the question, Would God in His revelation al- 
low us to remain under an impression exactly the op- 
posite of the truth, namely that light was an attribute 
of His own working in nature while it was really that of 
the Devil's? We would reply, God has never de- 
ceivedjman in any way, but for His own good reasons He 
has allowed the Devil to do so in many ways. All igno- 



21 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

ranee is the work of tih r.d God is only overcoming 

i rrrhrh ;:: : - • ■ : H. .5 r_- :- iir.r Hi; 

truth by . tries to deceive to the ut- 

most, that is, wherever he can he endeavors to mak 
believe the er :yr : sitr of the truth. God, for exam- 
ple., never ::ld man that the earth is flat. It was the 
Devil who did that, and it was only after many years : : 
straggle with Satan that God was able to let man un- 
stand that the earth is round. Here we see the 
Devil making us t eheve the exact opposite :: the truth, 
that the sun moves around the earth, whereas the earth 

ss around the sun. It is in accordance with 
that he should, for so long, have made us believe that 
light and heat, which are really disintegrating and 
destroying influences, and which never, under any cir- 
cumstances, created anything, are in themselves benefi- 
cent and preserving princir: fes. 

When Kepler presented, his defence of the Copernican 
thee r ■". : : h e academi ; senate of T G : ingen, the (tivin e s 

ere of opinion that it contained a deadly heresy, I e arose 
: otradicted the tpsn-hing ;f the Litie in that f assage 
re Joshua commands the sun. to stand still. To 

hich Key ier rephed that as the Bible addresse :i itself to 
mankind in genera] it spoke of things in the life of men 
as men in general are accustomed to speak of them. 
This must be our reply to those who object that light is 
spoken of as the good principle in the Bible and darkness 
as the e-'ii, It if sc expressed in concession to the 
popular misconception that light is able :: impart life and 
growth to plant organisms, joined with the practical ob- 
servation that darkness acts as a cover to hide evil deeris 



;; 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and that daylight makes the evil manifest. This last fact 
only shows that evil may serve a good purpose; but good 
remains good and evil remains evil for all that. A man 
might find it necessary to tear down a small house on a 
valuable piece of land in a crowded city in order to con- 
struct thereon a larger and better residence. In that 
case the work of destruction would be for a good purpose 
and would result in a higher construction ; but the act 
of tearing down the old house would be, though justified 
by the end in view, a destructive act, and nothing but 
a destructive act. What a singular misconception it 
would be if one should think that, because the end 
justified the means, the act of tearing down the first 
building was in reality an act of construction! Yet 
this is precisely the mistake under which those persons 
labor that regard the action of light in plant growth as a 
vitalizing and constructive influence. All that the 
light does is to disintegrate the particles of the plant and 
set them in motion. The result would be utterly de- 
structive of the organism, did not God, manifesting Him- 
self as the worker of chemical affinity and molecular co- 
hesion, overrule the disintegration caused by light and 
heat and therefrom construct a larger plant organism. 
Throughout, the action of light and heat has been 
destructive. Of course, the growth could not have 
taken place without it. So likewise moral growth can- 
not take place without temptation, or temptation without 
sin; and the existence of evil is thus necessary to moral 
advancement; but no one would be justified therefore in 
mistaking the evil for the good. Evil remains evil 
even when it is overruled by God for a good end. It 



2 3 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

is the work of the Devil and not of God, except that 
God in the beginning, for His own wise purposes, al- 
lowed the Devil to exist and to bring evil upon the uni- 
verse. The only answer to the question as to why God 
allowed the Devil to exist must be found in the hope 
that when the Devil is finally conquered, and the universe 
completely condensed, and love finally triumphant, the 
joy will be greater than it would have been if there had 
been no struggle ; and that the excess of happiness then 
will more than counterbalance the temporary pain we 
have now. While we may not say that whatever is now is 
best, we shall ultimately see that whatever has been has 
been for the best, though we may not know this till the 
whole plan is surveyed backward from Heaven. Of course 
the terms "good" and "evil" as applied to the moral 
conduct of man are much fuller of meaning than when 
used of the operations of the physical world, but the 
principle is identical in each. It is the same designing, 
conscious, evil spirit who destroys matter by light, heat, 
and electrical repulsion, or centrifugal energy, who in 
men tries to mar all beauty, to seduce all virtue, and to 
hamper all knowledge. 

One cannot say, for instance, that it is morally wrong 
for a man to light a candle ; but what we say is that when 
he does so, he calls into existence two destructive and 
dangerous motions, light and heat; and he is only justi- 
fied in doing so when he is prepared to hold them in 
check and to make them serve some good purpose. It 
would be wrong to light a candle and leave it so near a 
magazine of powder as to disintegrate the latter and de- 
stroy life and property. Man instinctively acknowledges 



24 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

that light and heat are dangerous disintegrating motions, 
when he confines his fires to stoves and fireplaces to 
keep their destructive properties in check. When prop- 
erly guarded they serve many good purposes, but they 
themselves are essentially evil and destructive. Even 
the gentle sunbeam, which causes pleasure to the human 
eye and agreeable sensations in a man's body, will ruin 
the vegetables in his cellar. At the same time that God 
holds the light of the sun sufficiently in check to make it 
serve some good purposes on the earth, in so far as it 
acts at all it is always a disintegrator. Every house- 
wife knows that she must keep her storeroom dark and 
cool in order to preserve her vegetable supplies from 
fermentation and rottenness. It may be said that great 
cold is destructive ; that, for instance, it as surely destroys 
certain things to have them frozen as to expose them to 
light and heat. But this is not the case. So long as 
any vegetable or animal substance is frozen it is not 
destroyed. It will keep indefinitely. But let heat 
approach it, and disintegration sets in at once. In the 
process of freezing one's body, the pain is caused by the 
conflict with heat. When heat is conquered and the 
face is frozen, there is no pain. It is only when heat is 
applied that the pain begins. Freezing may cause 
our life to depart elsewhere, for our souls now need 
bodies which contain heat; but they may be other- 
wise constituted some day; and cold is never a 
disintegrating process, though it may give rise to 
disintegration, just as evil may follow from the 
excess of any good. It may seem fanciful to use 
the terms "good" or "evil" in speaking of merely 



25 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

steal actions, neverth k principle cannot be 

The action of gravitation, like darkness and cold, is 
_; 5 beneficent and preservative, though the I 
may bring evil results out of it also, as where people 

from heights and are killed. Yet the same L 
which would be so misused by the Devil, is that with- 
out whi: :uld all be hurled into space. Good 
s : ri d gs I : r : m evil from good ; but the two are al- 
5 antagonist::. The Dei n\ uses even* integration 
as a stepping s::::e :: - wirier a:s::::egrat:: :.. 
uses ever/ a:: : : ; as raa:eral ::: a rhzhe- 
reconstruction. But no matter how closely good and 

[ are related as :uusc a::a erect, they are always dis- 
tinct from each other. Evil is nothing but evil though 
g: : a should spring :r:ra It: ana we must never rorifourd 
the evil with the good. L:gd: ana heat are always the 
work ;: the Devil ever, though God, by holding taemin 
:ae;k, brings good :u: :: :ue:r iestnictive a::i;r. 

The amount ::" light ana heat upon the earth from 
the sun will depend not only :n die amount ::' eact 
generated in the sun, but also upon the distance of the 
earth from the sun. Throughout all parts oi the 
struggle between :he Integrator and the Disintegrator 
there must be uniformity- in the rate :f God's triumph. 
Hj ::>r example, God, as the centripetal or magnetic at- 
tractive force, were to gain too great an a a an: a re : e: 
the centrifugal or electrical repulsive energy, :ur earth 
would be drawn much nearrr :ne sun tnan It is at 
present. We should therefore be burned, unless the sun 
had grown correspond: uru dooI. If the rate at which 

26 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the sun cools should correspond to the rate at which the 
centripetal force conquers the centrifugal energy, 
the temperature on the earth might remain the same as 
it is now, even if we were drawn as near to the sun as the 
moon is now to the earth. If the centripetal force which 
draws us to the sun conquered too quickly, we should be 
burned. If the condensation of the sun took place too 
quickly, we should be frozen; but God, who, by His 
great love, cares for each atom throughout the whole 
expanse of the universe, triumphs over Satan gradually 
in all parts together, and with sympathetic symmetry. 



27 



CHAPTER II. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY 
OF THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST. 

It is to be expected in an age of observation and 
scientific experiment, when men have discovered the 
fruitfulness of inductive methods, that natural laws, 
many of which assuredly throw light on the unexplained 
phenomena of life, should be regarded with an exaggerated 
importance that is truly marvellous to those standing 
far enough away from the scientific turmoil to view the 
whole position. We should strive after a rational and 
comprehensive judgment that coolly accords to each 
incident in the scene its due value and nothing more. 
The empirical scientists of the present day are down 
in the midst of natural phenomena. They are sur- 
rounded on all sides by material and secondary causes. 
They deal with what they can see and handle. The 
enormous mass of facts, experiments, technical terms, 
and limited generalizations prevents their breadth of 
vision. They cannot view the whole question in its 
relation to primary and efficient causes. Because a 
"law of nature", or uniformity in observed processes, 
may be for them the object of their search, they are apt 
to think that such a law is a final or ultimate principle 
and that it explains fully the facts about which they are 
reasoning. They find it hard to see that these laws are 
merely the most frequent modes of the working of a de- 

28 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

signing power. That same power may, on exceptional 
occasions, work by different laws; but the tendency is to 
overlook this. Hence men are apt to infer, because the 
conception of a human being in most known cases oc- 
curs upon the fertilization of the ovum by the spermato- 
zoa of a male, that it could not occur otherwise. It is 
absurd and presumptuous, however, to affirm, merely 
because we have found this to be necessary in those 
cases which have come under our notice, that no con- 
ception could occur without male fertilization. Be- 
cause the sun has risen every day within the memory of 
man, we may infer that it will rise tomorrow. There 
is an extremely strong probability that it will do so; 
but no one will argue that because it has risen every 
day it must rise again tomorrow. The reasoning is 
precisely the same with those who say that spiritual 
conception is impossible. It is improbable, viewed an- 
tecedently, we admit, that a human being could come 
into the world without the instrumentality of a material 
father, yet it is just as clearly possible as that the sun 
may not rise tomorrow. 

We admit the antecedent improbability of the con- 
ception of a human being without male co-operation of 
a material character, yet if we can show that the whole 
life of Jesus was unique, then the dpriori improbability 
will be reversed. The historical position of the Naz- 
arene is, we assert, one without parallel. Mahomet and 
Gautama were sent by God to found great systems of 
religion. They have fulfilled a great part of God's plan 
in human growth, but would anyone argue (i) that 
either of these systems, if universally adopted, would 



29 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

produce an ideal state, one worthy of being the climax 
of human development; (2) that these religions have 
shown themselves actually possessed of inherent power 
sufficient to lead to the hope of their universality and 
perfection? On the other hand, will any deny that if 
the Kingdom of God, as described by Jesus in His 
parables and teachings, were realized upon the earth, it 
would be an ideal state, one of perfect happiness, suffi- 
cient justification and explanation of man's origin and 
development? Or will anyone deny that the Church 
of Jesus, which has overcome the religious bigotry of 
the Jews, the refined skepticism of the Greeks, the proud 
selfishness and mighty power of the Romans, the 
superstition of the Middle Ages, the heresies of inward 
traitors and outward foes, and holds to-day the civilized 
and self-governing nations of the world in its rapidly 
widening grasp, possesses a mysterious power, one 
diametrically opposed to any human force, namely the 
power of self-abnegation, love, weakness, — the mightiest 
principle which the world has ever seen? Do not all 
the tendencies of the present lead to the hope that this 
strange power will continue to work like leaven till the 
whole earth is impregnated thereby, and subdued 
thereto, and God's will shall t ione on earth as it is 
now done in Heaven? Jesus occupies the center of 
History. He stands alone. No other man ever made 
such claims and had them substantiated by such a spot- 
less life and sublime death, or by the self-sacrificing 
labors of His followers, the cheerful death of martyred 
saints, the unprecedented triumphs of his teachings. If 
then, apart altogether from the miraculous and supra- 



3° 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

sensuous elements in the life of Christ, one arrives at 
the perfectly rational conclusion that His place in the 
plan is different, not only in degree but in kind, from all 
others, we should naturally expect three things: (i) that 
the soul of Jesus should come from a different sphere 
from that of all others; (2) that it should be incarnated 
by a different process; and (3) that the development of 
self-consciousness and power, which proceeds slowly in 
other men, would be exceedingly rapid in Him, and that 
He would perform acts appearing to men to be super- 
natural, which they would call miracles and imagine 
to be contraventions of the laws of nature. Looked at 
from this point of view, the immaculate conception of 
Jesus appears to be precisely what we should have ex- 
pected a priori, especially when we find that in so many 
startling particulars He fulfils the prophecies of the Jews 
regarding their Messiah, and the expectation that their 
deliverer should be born of a pure virgin. 

It may now be observed that pre-established harmony 
is an explanation quite sufficient to make us view this 
procedure as natural and orderly. The control of the de- 
tails of the universe by its Creator may be by the con- 
tinual adjustment and exercise of His ever-present 
power, or it may be by a pre-arrangement of forces that 
contain sufficient strength to carry them onwards, under 
His Divine permission and guidance, of course, to ful- 
fil their work ages after the creative act first proceeded 
from the Divine mind. In such a view of things the 
pre-establishment of a harmonious relationship between 
co-ordinating physical conditions would fully account 
for the existence in the Virgin of a species of ovum 



3i 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

which would contain all that was*~necessary forjthe 
production of a man child. We mean that the Creator 
in arranging the details of man's life on earth, with 
Divine foresight and power, might have so planned the 
physical development of the line of David that a 
descendant of that house, the Virgin Mary, should be of 
this nature and possess this exceptional power. 

Moreover, even this hypothesis is not necessary when 
we reflect that God not only governs by the pre-estab- 
lished harmony of His own machinery, but that every- 
where, and in all things, He rules by direct oversight 
from Heaven, that He makes one substance different 
from another by altering the affinities of its atoms or the 
polarities of its ions or molecules. Now the difference be- 
tween an unfertilized ovum and one that is fertilized, or 
even between the zoa of the male and the female seed, is 
merely one of atomic and molecular arrangement, as 
are all differences in phenomena, all being various ex- 
pansions of the universal substance. Therefore the 
simplest and, after all, the most rational, idea of the 
conception of Jesus in the Virgin by the Holy Ghost, is 
the old-fashioned belief that the power of the Most 
High came upon her and changed the constitution of the 
ovum, perhaps by the alteration of the polarities or 
affinities of its atoms, so that it became fertilized directly, 
instead of intermediately by the instrumentality of an 
earthly father. 

It may be argued that the ground of this controversy 
has been shifted by the Higher Criticism to the au- 
thenticity of the first chapters of St. Luke and other 
portions of the Gospels, which describe the conception 



32 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and birth of Jesus. It was only to be expected that men 
looking first at the antecedent probability of each 
detail in the story would assert that the narrative was 
written to fit in with a theory of Messiahship as it existed 
in the mind of a not-unbiassed writer, or as it was 
handed along by oral exaggeration. We have shown, 
however, that the most reasonable and philosophical atti- 
tude is that of a spectator who views the whole question 
in the light of its historical developments, and then, after 
getting his true bearings as to the general character of 
the Incarnation, begins an examination of the details 
of Our Saviour's life. 

It is asserted by some, who lay especial stress upon the 
genealogical record in the First chapter of Matthew, 
tracing the descent of Jesus from Abraham down, that 
Joseph was the father of our Saviour. In the 16th 
verse of this chapter we read: "And Jacob begat Joseph, 
the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, Who is 
called Christ." We should not fail to notice that this 
verse is the only one of the series into which the name of 
a woman is brought. If it were intended to be inferred 
that Jesus was the son of Joseph, why should not the 
form of this verse be the same as that of the preceding 
fifteen verses? We should expect the verse to have 
been: "And Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph begat 
Jesus, Who is called Christ." The exceptional way in 
which the sentence is worded, and the manner in which 
the Virgin is introduced, make it plain that while the 
writer regarded Mary as unmistakably the mother of 
Jesus, he either did not believe Joseph to be His father 
or had at least his doubts regarding it. Matthew might 



33 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

not have happened to know much about the manner of 
our Lord's birth, and might have been merely in doubt 
as to whether or not Joseph was really the father of Jesus. 
This is supposing (contrary to our admission) that, 
though the first seventeen verses are authentic, the re- 
mainder of the chapter is a later interpolation, inserted 
to make the narrative fit in with the prophecy of Isaiah: 
" Behold a Virgin shall be with child, and shall bring 
forth a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, 
which being interpreted is 'God with us'." We have 
shown that, even if this were the case, the manner of St. 
Matthew's narrative in the first eighteen verses would 
indicate that he had his doubts of Joseph's fatherhood. 
Again even if Joseph had been the father of Jesus 
(which we do not admit), it would not have proved that 
the conception was not the work of the Holy Spirit. We 
cannot tell how the male zoa fecundate the female when 
the two come together by the co-operation of the sexes. 
There is required in the conception of every human 
being the guiding and indwelling power of the Holy 
Spirit, who influences the spermatozoa and makes them 
perform their work by a direct act of the Divine Will. 
You cannot explain the fertilization of an ovum by any 
material causes. You say that the two forms of matter 
possess an affinity for each other that makes them 
unite and a fertilized ovum is the result. But what is 
affinity ? Blind attraction ? Certainly not. That is 
the ultima thule of unreason. There must be a conscious 
designing power at the back of the motions of the 
spermatozoa by which they are impelled to unite with 
other animalculae in the ovum and to begin the work of 



34 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

creating little communities of living organisms, which 
in the aggregate make up what we call a human body. 
Under any circumstances, therefore, Jesus must have 
been conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the 
Virgin Mary, even if Joseph had been a human in- 
strument used by God as an intermediate material 
agent in the process (which he was not). The same 
reasoning holds true of any of the other disagreeable 
theories that may be advanced, whether it be asserted 
that the possible earthly agent might have been a Roman 
soldier, or a fanatical priest of the Temple, who, deceiv- 
ing or mayhap self-deceived, worked upon the credulity 
or hysteria of the Virgin, rendering her the unconscious 
co-agent in the work. There is something intensely 
repugnant and inherently discordant with the whole 
system in any of these suppositions, especially in the 
theory that Joseph was the father. Upon this supposi- 
tion we might search for a long time in the laws of 
heredity to discover the probable production of such a son 
by such a father. Canon Liddon has pointed out, in 
his 'Bampton Lectures', the difficulty of accounting for 
so strange — so audacious — an ambition in an unlearned 
and obscure Galilean, upon any other supposition than 
His divine origin. Whence came the unparalleled 
claim of a world-wide empire, an undying kingdom, 
the absolute yielding of the hearts and wills of all men 
to Him? Surely not from the blood and brain of a 
commonplace Joseph. We see therefore that the state- 
ment of the creeds, "He was conceived by the Holy 
Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," stands impregnable, 
and that the most probable and fitting view, as well as 

35 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the most rational and scientific, is the old-fashioned 
orthodox belief which we have heretofore held, that the 
conception was an extraordinary working of the Divine 
power directly from Heaven. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLA NATORY 
OF THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. 

As Jesus grew into manhood, constant brooding over 
His plans would develop within Him that inner power 
which sees below the surface of phenomena and pierces 
the eternal mystery of the Real. Vistas of the true laws 
that govern nature would be spread out before Him. 
The ever-present consciousness of His destiny, that 
resistless river within each soul, which sweeps men on 
through life, surged within His breast. Those occasion- 
al glimpses which all get of their former life — those 
fleeting, indescribable presentiments that lift the veil 
of the future for the millionth part of a second — came 
to Him frequently and were recognized by Him to 
be what they are, — revelations from the Father. In- 
trospection with Him meant communion with God. 
All knowledge comes from within. Experience of ex- 
ternalities furnishes only the material for the mind to 
work upon. The persistence, power, and vividness of 
internal suggestion are the most prominent character- 
istics of all true prophets, poets, or inventors. Their 
minds assume control of their bodies, their senses, their 
experiences and all their material environments. 
So this vitalizing, moulding, classifying, and formative 
something within took full possession of the young 
Galilean. The world of outward facts about Him was 



37 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

subjected before the growing consciousness of inward 
knowledge and power. He saw that things are false. 
They appear manifold and variegated, and they really 
are one, of one substance and governed by one mind. 
That this one mind is God, and that He was being filled 
with the Divine mind more than any other man had 
been, or would be, He must have known beyond ques- 
tion. Though He felt His knowledge of realities widen- 
ing and deepening every day, He could not have yet 
become infallible. Long after this He confessed that 
He was ignorant of certain things which at that time it 
was not given to any but the Father Himself to know. 
It was like an infinite ocean pouring itself down into an 
ever-enlarging well, a receptacle specially constructed to 
expand and to hold more than any other, yet, for the 
present, limited. Though the boundless ocean above 
still emptied itself into His mind, there was space in Him 
to receive more. The channel of communication was 
unimpeded from the Father to the Son, but the passage 
from the Son to the Father was beset by the hindrances 
incidental to humanity. He knew that He was being 
led on by the Spirit and brought into all knowledge, 
and that He was gradually acquiring all the Father's 
power; but, for the time, He was content to be led step 
by step. 

When He went to St. John the Baptist to be baptized, 
He received the first remarkable confirmation of His 
mission. It was probably on its material side a phe- 
nomenon of an electrical nature. We cannot satisfac- 
torily explain the origin of an internally suggested idea 
by any known law of psychology. The irritation of a 

38 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

peripheral nerve may be the instrument whereby an 
external object originates an idea; but to find the source 
of a mental act that springs from within is a difficulty 
that can be solved only in one way. We must believe 
that our brains are but the harps upon which the master 
hand of the Spirit plays the music of our thoughts. 
Looked at from its material side, the act of the World- 
Spirit in striking off an idea through a nerve centre of 
the brain is akin to a slight electric shock. The mani- 
festation of God to Christ at the River Jordan was 
probably an enlargement and intensification of the 
phenomenon that accompanies the suggestion of an 
ordinary idea to a commonplace man. The brain of 
Christ, we infer d priori, would likely be of a highly 
sensitive and delicate organization. We should expect 
its convolutions to be more numerous and more highly 
differentiated than in the case of any other, if only from 
the introspective and intensely contemplative habit which 
must have arisen from the peculiar circumstances of His 
birth and His mother's teaching. Remembering these 
facts, we can picture the scene at the river. There was 
the excitement and magnetic influence of a large gather- 
ing of people. The young and unknown Galilean, at- 
tracted by the fervid outpourings of the Baptist, ap- 
proaches with the intensifying consciousness that He is 
nearing a crisis in His life. He is impelled by that 
strange feeling which He now knows so well, and which 
is described in the New Testament as being "led by 
the Spirit". The fierce denunciations of John are ring- 
ing in the ears of the multitude: "Oh generation of 
vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 



39 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

come ? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance, 
and think not to say within yourselves: We have 
Abraham to our father; for I say unto you that God is 
able of these stones to raise up children tmto Abraham. 
And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees; 
therefore even* tree which bringeth not forth good fruit 
is hewn down and cast into the fire: I indeed baptize 
you with water unto repentance, but He that cometh 
after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy 
to bear; He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and 
with fire." — Matt. Ill: 7 to 10. 

With what a thrill of verified presentiment must 
Jesus have heard these words ! As He drew nigh, He 
must have been raised to the highest pitch of nervous 
tension. Then, to bring the strain to its climax, St. 
John, recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, cries : " Behold 
the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world ! 
This is He of whom I said: After me cometh a man 
which is preferred before me, for He was before me!" 

Might we not anticipate that the World-Spirit, who 
works upon all brains making ideas known by electric 
shocks that disintegrate nerve centres, would give 
now some striking manifestation of His methods of 
communication? Should we not expect Him to say 
what we are told He did say ; ' ' This is my beloved Son 
in whom I am well pleased ? M It may have been merely 
an idea suggested to the mind of Jesus : " Thou art my 
beloved Son," as St. Luke records, accompanied by so 
powerful an electric discharge that there was an actual 
flame of light resembling a dove upon His head. So 
great^was the magnetic sympathy in the overwrought 

4C 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and excited multitude that all were worked upon by 
the same idea, and to them it was: " This is my beloved 
Son." When we offer this explanation, however, we 
do not take the miracle-element out of the scene. 
Looked at on its material side, it was probably but an 
extraordinary instance of internal suggestion, manifest- 
ing itself in a noticeable electric disturbance. Yet 
back of every internal suggestion is God or Satan. To 
resolve some miracles into phenomena of clairvoyance, 
hysteria, nervous prostration, or mania is not finally to 
explain them, but merely to show that the World- 
Spirit sometimes works through these conditions. 

After this we find that Jesus, still under the guidance 
of His internal prompter, went into an uninhabited 
place to fast and meditate in order that He should be 
further initiated into the mysteries of the power of God. 
The result was most startling. He seems, by His in- 
trospective reflection and by His communion with God 
— perhaps also by intercourse with other beings of the 
Spiritual hierarchy who " ministered unto Him" — to 
have discovered three secrets of nature that have never 
been revealed to any other man, even now in our scien- 
tific age. These are: 

First. The transmutation of substances. 

Second. The true nature of gravitation. 

Third. The secret of destructive power. 

These facts are presented to us in the three 
temptations by which He was assailed. First. He 
was an hungered, and the Devil suggested to Him 
that He should convert the stones about Him into 
bread- 



41 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION'. 

The trans mutation of s been the 

golden are an; if the scientific explorer. It follows oat- 

urally from the idea of the : things. If the trees 

and railways and houses and men about us are but 

aent combinations of the atoms :: one elementary 

:r,thenT- mry t» discover what it is that 

mbine with the same regularity of 

fiff :;d the ability to transmute or change wood 

iron, :r iron intc flesh, :r s::r.-:s into bread, wfll at 

e follow. T. ad by this time begun to 

realize and work upon the unit}- of all things is more 
than probable. As He understood His mission to 
be the a_ agether :: men on the earth in - : sue 

man by the unity :: :iiei: finite souls in the Infinite God, 
so He saw that the same uniting force is triumphing in 
nature as rhemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and 
gravitation. We should r::;e:: from the revelation of 
His missi:r_ is moral unity an enlightenment within 
Him upon the unity of nana re, a n a . a s a d ecessary corol- 
lary therefrom, the power :: reduce but seventy or 
^cre eiememary su :s: : " its into fewer and mere general 
ir.es. and, amally, after He had been raised from the 
dead and had declared that all power in Heaven and 
earth had been given unto Him. we should expect Him 
:: b e able to reduce all seventy atoms :: the ane universal 
substance. From these : : " si rierari: :is i: Might not to 
cause in us surprise that the fir-: great specific secret of 

are apparently discovered by Chris: should have 
been the transmutation of substances . Is i: r. : : wc nder- 
ieriul :iaa: :he aream :: :ae aaiita" alchemist and :ae 
goal of modern synthetic chemists was reached by 



--' 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the Galilean in His solitary meditation before He had 
begun His active work or had wrought a single miracle ? 
Is it not also a fact strongly corroborative of this theory 
that His first wonder was performed by virtue of this 
discoveiy? The changing of water into wine is just 
such a manifestation of His power as we should have 
expected h priori. 

The second temptation of Jesus shows that He had 
solved the secret of the true nature of gravitation, and this 
is precisely what we would expect to follow from His 
discovery of the transmutation of substances by altering 
their polarities or their relation to Heaven. Gravita- 
tion is God manifesting Himself in drawing bodies to- 
gether, just as in chemical affinity He draws atoms, or in 
molecular cohesion He draws molecules. We are told 
that the Devil suggested to Jesus that He should cast 
Himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, and 
God would give His Angels charge over Him so that 
He should not dash His foot against a stone. In other 
words, as soon as He had discovered a secret which 
enabled Him to counteract the law of g avitation, He felt 
a natural human temptation to test the power for His 
own satisfaction and perhaps to gratify a pride of 
power which He knew to be a sin. He was so real a 
man that as soon as He had the power He wanted to 
use it and take pleasure in it, but He remembered that 
the Father had given Him this new potency for the glory 
of the omnipotent God and the good of His fellow-men. 
So H2 put the temptation from Him; but the indirect 
evidence it gives of Christ's true nature, and the light it 
throws on His works, remain for our benefit. Men have 



43 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

always looked forward to a time when they could fly in 
the air. Flying machines are the first inventions that 
men picture to themselves when they prophesy of things 
to come in a few centuries. Yet we are far from dis- 
covering the great secret that was probably revealed to 
Jesus in the wilderness, a discovery that explains many 
of the most remarkable phenomena of His life and es- 
pecially the great fact of His ascension. 

The third secret is the counterpart of the second. 
We are told that the Devil led Christ to the top of a 
high mountain, and showed Him all the Kingdoms of 
the earth, and offered Him all things, if He would 
bow down and worship him. It does not require great 
ingenuity to offer a somewhat plausible explanation of 
this episode. He had discovered the secret of destruc- 
tive power. By the exercise of this energy He could have 
annihilated all the armies and fortifications in the world, 
and reigned an earthly king with supreme authority 
and the highest military glory. Some men regard 
Christ as a mystical Person, who was neither God nor 
man. They invest Him with a halo of unreal majesty 
that obscures His humanity and prevents the outflow 
of genuine love and gratitude toward Him. He was 
so truly a man, so natural, and so like any other young 
man under the same circumstances, that some thought 
like the following occurred to Him: "Why should I not 
set up an earthly kingdom and conquer these proud 
Romans, and establish the throne of David as the 
supreme power f of the world? These haughty and 
selfish foreigners^who are trampling upon our God- 
selected race, — ,behold their foolish pride in armed 



44 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

strength ! How easily could I destroy a Roman Legion !" 
Then, perhaps, there came over His mind the recollec- 
tion of the mournful cadence of Isaiah: "He was de- 
spised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces 
from Him!" He saw a nobler kingdom than that of 
earth; a kingdom that should have no end, wherein 
should reign love and peace and absolute unity through 
self-sacrifice. This power of destruction was but an 
instrument to be subjected to His more glorious work. 
With meek submission He threw back the momentary 
impulse that had come over him when the secret of 
destruction first flashed through His mind, an impulse 
that was foreign to His true nature, but which shows 
the reality of His manhood. When we read of His sub- 
sequent sufferings, and of the mob that came to take 
Him, headed by the miserable Judas, and reflect upon 
this secret knowledge whereby He could have blown 
them literally to atoms, we catch a glimpse of the 
sublimity of His sacrifice. 

The events of the first week after Christ's return from 
the Wilderness are interesting to the scientific enquirer 
because of the evidence they bear to His power of mind- 
reading and the personal, magnetic or mesmeric power 
by which He attracted His followers about Him. T wo 
disciples of the Baptist, one of whom was Andrew and 
the other, in all probability, the beloved disciple, had 
followed Jesus from Jordan and enquired timidly of 
Him where He made His abode. He told them to 
"Come and see." The result was that they became 
immediately attached to Him with a love that lasted 



45 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

during their frves Andrew wen] in search of 

■-:;:::;: : : .:. :s nt.it : 

rxersiied :*re: id ~a:m 
He chose be win be His irmnediatr service. Philip :: 

Z:":.:::_ "if menaien is ±ey "-re Eiarruar. : a daei: 
: m :: I- . : 1 F:L:~ 

me was v ~. . '.. . i : v ; : the others- 

7 1 : : ::s_d. :; 3 arid: 

lived at Cana, and his 6isf Enough! was be crmmmti : i 
:he lis :: very :: din. He scar: :a cried 

We have found Hire :: 7 : 5 es :a dae :a~ la: 

:he Fr:a: it Bartholomew seems to h 

leea 1 i ready ::a:i : ma sericus man. He 

. iyahaz his daily :dd:i ::' prayer 1 
vras :i: ::ui Te~5 :: -- a rig :::: 

111 " rssibly -ii: in : 1: rn:i — ere :n me sun:: :: :ni 
cmmiiedidessiah " i :; :np ~i:: nnr 

di:ama:'~is daa: :: _ 1: Duly Jesns :: Naeareda mi 
na :■: Trseuh :he mimemiry hush :: izniemen: nee 
iwaj n: :e and he enquired mm i aid sneer 

Tin ihere any 1::: :hing acme :::: ::' Ndaaare:ia? 
?an ::_d him :; lime :ad 577 When Jesus sm 
LNTaahaniel in:: He ;ai Beheld in Israelite in- 
deed :i"i:i::: 1: ran Nnrhandel said unrc Him 
"Wh. 

n:::: :ai: Philip ::n: 1: a: nn: 

:iz dp :::: I si" thee Ida :e 1: '.z drub: 

that :: n. ; :iae looked secret sympathy iri m:eiiigerice 
accompanying these wordi :: a: 

E smahel: a of 

meugh: up ::: -dam he ~as : ::::::: - dim 11 si: ran: 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the fig tree, that caused him to cry out immediately: 
"Rabbi thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of 
Israel." Jesus said unto him, "Because I said unto 
thee I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou ? Thou 
shalt see greater things than these." Then as if to 
open up the highest vista of the universe that had been 
yet vouchsafed to Him, showing that He had grasped 
the idea of Heaven as a sphere above us, attracting our 
eaith, and all on it, to itself, and from which God sends 
down His spiritual forces to move and direct all earthly 
objects, He utters the striking words, rather, perhaps, 
as an expression of His own exalted vision than as an 
intelligible promise to His hearers: "Ye shall see 
Heaven opened, and the Angels of God ascending and 
descending upon the Son of Man." 

Jesus seems to have had a motive for hurrying back 
to Galilee. There was to be a wedding in Cana, and 
from the prominent part taken therein by Mary, the 
bride was probably her daughter or niece. The arrival 
of the five newly-found friends of Jesus appears to have 
been unexpected, and His mother had evidently thought 
He would return alone. When she found that the wine 
was becoming exhausted therefore, she appealed to Him 
to help them in this strait, having faith in His divine 
powers. At first, Jesus, apparently, disliked the idea. 
In His subsequent life He displayed the same shrinking 
from the exercise of any manifestation of supernatural 
power. His reply, "Woman what have I to do with 
thee?" would be divested of its apparent harshness if 
we understood the term "woman" to be one of possible 
tenderness as it was in the original, and the idea seems 



47 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

to be rather, " Mother, what has this to do with me, or 
my mission ? Why should I employ any of my newly- 
discovered powers, which were given me for the glory of 
God, in supplying your temporary need ? Mine hour 
is not yet come." A second thought, however, altered 
His decision. He may have reflected that the shortage 
was largely due to his having brought five extra guests, 
so that He was in duty bound to repair the evil, if He 
could, or He may have come to the conclusion that, 
after all, His hour for showing control of phenomena 
had come, and that this was a good opportunity to begin. 
The act of chang'ng the water into wine was the sim- 
plest experiment of His new theory of the transmutation 
of substances. It involved only a mere outflow of 
electric force whereby the molecules of the water were 
charged and their polarities slightly altered. It may 
have been that as His eyes rested on the s x pots of 
stone the plan occurred to Him, and He inferred from 
the fact of God's having brought the means so near to 
His hand that He intended Him to use them. He 
seems to have intimated to His mother that He would 
comply with her request, for she gave the domestics in- 
structions to place themselves at His disposal. The 
result was what we might have expected. The phenom- 
enal water became phenomenal wine. It was real wine 
in the same sense that water is real water. Water and 
wine as well as nitric acid and sugar, or ink and milk, 
are really all the same substance. They are but differ- 
ent kinds of expansions of that substance; and to one 
who understood how through polarization or magnetism 
these different degrees of expansion are accomplished, 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

a secret which we are clearing up slowly nowadays, it 
was indeed a simple act to change the water into wine. 
Jesus could not have been a real man without feeling 
somewhat elated in consequence of the success of His 
first miracle. By this name we rightly denominate His 
extraordinary and wonderful manifestation of control 
of the external world. There must have been a human 
delight in His awful power, and a thrill of satisfaction 
because the Father had now corroborated beyond all 
possibility of doubt the truth of His mother's story and 
His own belief in His Messiahship. While the voice 
that cried, "This it my beloved Son," at His baptism 
might be mistaken for a purely subjective or imaginary 
revelation; here was the actual change of an external 
object that could be tasted and handled and proved 
by the senses through its permanence. Though He 
had refused to convert stones into bread to appease His 
own hunger, or to gratify His own curiosity, or to test His 
revealed discovery, He had transmuted the water into 
wine for the sake of others, and had received His assur- 
ance from the Father. 

What should be done next ? His hour had come. Tie 
would proclaim Himself the Messiah, and this in, the 
most public manner. The Passover was at hand. He 
would go to Jerusalem, the center of religious activity, 
the seat of God's covenanted spiritual Presence. Men 
had corrupted the worship of the God of love. Their 
rites and ceremonies were but a cloak for hollow selfish- 
ness and repulsive worldliness. His first work must be 
to purify the fountain head. He therefore took His 
mother and brethren and disciples and went to 



49 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Capernaum to await the irst caravan starting foe the 
Capital 

As they drew rear :: Jerusalem, terse throngs of pil- 
grims were liscerned coming bom all rearers to ihe 
Holy City. Proselytes of every nation were nttei iog 
cries ir n languages, and me chaos that attends 

large crowds :: srargcrs was visible w all sides. 7re 
streets and avenues lecture be the Temple were espec- 
ially crowded. Here me tauirs that attend show- 
gatherings were busy crying their ~ares. Jugglers iri 
mountebanks were Endeavoring :: reran the attention 
;: b eg pilgrims. There were Dthei objects of 

merchandise, however, connected with me Ter.r.e 
sendee. Sa:r:d :es :: sheep and rxer arc doves were 
:: be made. Drovers and others that had these creat- 
ures for sale thronged the murt :: the Seniles, sc thai 
wir'rm the consecrated enclosure ""ere center herds :: 
animals that p:llu:ed :he sacred place with their dim, 
As the yearly tribute :: the Atonement money, half a 
shekel, which must be giver t: me Priests by every 
Israelite, arte by tut proselytes from all pares, could only 
be paid ir silver, a thriving exchange :radi: was carried 
on ry .-rge numbers c: venders teat took tee ::ins of 
cliferert countries, art various metals in exchange for 
the required sort. We tar. imagine the srecu :i awed 
surprise which tame upon me startled trowds as the 
figure of the young Gafilean appeared among mem, 
erett arc stem, full : i ar indescribable, magnetic p ower 
that cause a a paralysis ti steal : er their brains and 
rerirrea them powerless be appose His will. With a 
scourge c: ensues, hastily timet up t'recu me grcund, 



P 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

He drove out the degraded hucksters and overthrew the 
tables of the money-changers. The droves of cattle and 
sheep were turned out of the Court of the Gentiles, and 
He ordered them to remove the cages of doves. 

When this had been done, the people partially re- 
covered from the first effects of the shock. The Priests 
and Scribes and leaders of the people, when they had 
regained sufficient composure, gathered around Him, 
and, while not yet daring to accuse or attack Him, de- 
manded by what authority He took these bold measures, 
and challenged Him to show some signs in proof that 
He was rightly assuming this high-handed position. 
The thought that seems to have flashed through His 
brain was singularly in keeping with our theory of the 
development of the Divine knowledge and power within 
Him. It was what we should expect, h priori, to enter 
His mind at this instant. Here was a moment of in- 
tense nervous tension. His brain must have been in a 
highly sensitive and excited state, and His mind in a 
condition of great exaltation. Before Him rose the 
magnificent Temple and, at once, there came upon Him 
the recollection of His discovery of the secret of de- 
structive power. "I could destroy this Temple and, in 
less than three days, I could bring its parts together 
again by the magnetic union of the particles of the stones 
and by my power over the gravitation of the materials 
to each other.' ' But in the minutest fraction of a second 
this thought was succeeded by another, "It is the Devil 
who destroys. Your mission is to construct and unify." 
Therefore He said aloud, " Destroy this Temple and 
in three days I will raise it up." A third thought was 

Si 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

possibly sent by the Spirit as quickly as an electric spark 
flies, "Nay, I have put this into thy mind to teach 
thee that they shall destroy the temple of thy body, and 
in three days I shall raise it up again ; and that this ex- 
clusive system of worship shall be superseded by a 
church of Jews and Gentiles that thou shalt found, 
a Temple that shall be ten thousand times more 
glorious than this of Solomon." 

The effect on the Jews however was powerful and 
lasting. They broke up into angry groups discussing 
loudly this apparently blasphemous assertion, for, like 
most utterances, it was soon distorted by those who 
heard it in their relation of it to others that had been 
out of hearing. It was twisted into a statement that 
He would destroy the Temple and in three days build it 
again. Others would probably report that He had 
spoken derisively of the Temple saying that He could 
build a better one in three days. Jesus Himself prob- 
ably explained to His disciples afterwards, or at least to 
the one whom He loved and who tells us Our Saviour's 
meaning here, that the real and spiritual reference was 
to the destruction of His body. The lasting nature of 
the effect of His words is proved by the fact that three 
years afterwards they were used in evidence against 
Him at His trial before the Sanhedrim. 

The thought of the destruction of His body perhaps 
recalled the fact that His must be a life of meekness 
rather than of triumphant manifestations of power. 
The latter must not usurp the chief place in His work, 
but should be always subjected to the higher work of 
teaching love and non-resistance, of showing to the 



5* 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

world that the greatest power on earth is gentleness. 
Some exercises of His extraordinary potency He would 
allow Himself to work for the relief of suffering and the 
strengthening of His mission, but these must take a 
subordinate place. He did not wish to draw men to 
Him by their love of the marvellous, by pandering to 
their vulgar admiration of signs and wonders. There- 
fore, instead of going on with an exciting work in the 
Holy City, it would be better to return quietly to Naz- 
areth and, by teaching and doing good, slowly prepare 
the whole country for the final publication of His 
Kingdom at Jerusalem. 

One incident, however, arises from this visit to the 
Temple that brings out clearly Our Lord's compre- 
hension of His mission. Amongst the spectators of His 
attack upon the defllers of the Temple was Nicodemus, 
a member of the Sanhedrim and a man of thought. 
The bearing of Jesus and the attractiveness of His 
Holy personality had made a deep impression upon the 
aristocrat. He was anxious to hear more of this young 
provincial enthusiast. These acts and words seemed 
fraught with divine power. No man could do things 
like these, unless God were with him. The Hebrew 
ruler had all the timidity of a conventionalist and a 
man of position, a shyness which shrinks from emotional 
vulgarity and dreads above all things the ridicule of one's 
peers. He may have come to Jesus secretly by night, 
less from actual fear of the Jews than from a dread of 
the personal humiliation which he would feel if, after 
all, this young prophet should prove to be a quack or a 
fanatic. The words of our Saviour to him are clear 



53 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and in accordance with the theory we are setting 
forth, that whereas all other men have come from the 
moon or some other planet and were cast into Hell, 
viz., our earth when it was a "lake of fire", Jesus came 
directly from the central sphere, and was incarnated by 
a different process of conception, and was the only be- 
gotten Son of God in this special sense, who was sent 
by the Father to get us out of our world of everlasting 
torment back to God by love. " Marvel not that I said 
unto thee, Ye must be born from above. * * * " Verily, 
verily, I say unto thee, we speak that we do know and bear 
witness of that we have seen, and ye receive not our wit- 
ness. If I told you earthly things and ye believe not, how 
shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things ? And no man 
hath ascended into Heaven but He that descended out 
of Heaven even the Son of Man which is in Heaven.''' 
After a brief stay in Judea, during which the disciples 
baptized a few converts, they began their return to 
Nazareth. On His way Jesus stopped at Jacob's Well, 
near Sychar, to rest, while His disciples probably went 
to the city near by to obtain provisions. A woman 
came to draw water, and the dialogue that ensued forms 
a complement to the conversation with Nicodemus, 
in the light which it throws on Christ's full realization 
of the spirituality and universality of His kingdom. 
God should henceforth be worshipped in spirit and 
in truth, without regard to geographical boundaries. For 
the first time Jesus explicitly and unambiguously de- 
clares His Messiahship, " I that speak to thee am He." 
Our Lord also shows His power either of mind-reading 
or superhuman knowledge in telling the woman of her 
adulterous life. 

54 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

When they arrived at Nazareth, Jesus went into the 
synagogue on the Sabbath and, according to His custom, 
stood up to read. The book of Isaiah was handed to 
Him, and He read from the sixty-first chapter the 
words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach 
good tidings to the poor. He hath sent me to proclaim 
release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to proclaim 
the acceptable year of the Lord." He sat down to ex- 
pound the passage as was the custom. When He pro- 
ceeded to show that these words applied to Him, that 
He was the promised Deliverer, they listened spell- 
bound by the grace of His demeanor and the force of 
His arguments. Then the thought arose, "Whence 
hath He this wisdom ? Is not this the son of Joseph ? 
Can this be the boy we have seen grow up amongst us ? " 
Such thoughts as these roused the petty jealousies and 
provincial prejudices of the Nazarenes. Their wonder 
grew into anger. "The man pretendeth to be the 
Messiah! He is mad! This is blasphemy!" These 
were probably the muttered remarks. Yet above these 
angry murmurings the calm voice of Jesus continued the 
argument. His kingdom was to be a universal one and 
should embrace the Gentiles. To prove that God had 
regarded the heathen nations with favor, He quoted 
precedents in the lives of Elijah and Elisha. There 
had been many widows in Israel, yet Elijah had been 
sent only to a foreigner, the widow at Zarephath. 
There had been many lepers in Israel, yet Elisha had 
cured only Naaman who was a Syrian. God thereby 
showed that His salvation should come to the Gentiles 



55 



THE PHI] - INTEGRATION. 

is "-ell as Hii looser race. This was toomndL The 
grumblings grew into oper. and frequent interrupt: : is 
and finally all present rose :: their feet, overcome will 
-ice. and seized Him. What should they do with this 
f resume to us young fanatic whose ambition had crazed 
Him. who had been brought up amongst them and now 
aspired :: be their ruler, and even claimed to be the 
tr; raise a Messiah? This then ~as the srtre: :-" His 
:uie: ways! He had never mingiea with the res 
ahem baa: hep: much in sea trade and meditarlor. 
was the explanation of His sham humility. He thought 
Hams eh above them all. He would like them to ac- 
knowledge Him as a prophet. ::rs::th: He mas: ale. 
There is :he tiiaa yonder. It: as mar Him hentc and 
throw Him ever. T: the thai! Tc the cliff! 

"While they were fannying Him along. Jestas probat 
thought :: tine second form :f His temptatitn. He had 
been tempted to test His t jwei ::' : : mrr ening the law 
::' gravitation by throwing Himself from the pinnack 
of tie Temple, which would have been at the same time 
: startling way :: arrm ring me attenticn : f all I ilestme 
He had refused to yield to the suggestion which He 
recognized as coming from the Dead : and now God was 
going to give Him the opporrunir He ie sired. When 
they reached the edge :: :he tide therefore be cast Him 
: ver. instead of seeing Him fall a iiieless corpse on the 
rocks below, He seemed transformed into some tight 
and aiiy substance that could penetrate material ob- 
jects and a: straight hrragh them. In this manner 
He passed through the midst of them as though He 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

seconds later they saw Him pursuing His way down the 
hill and out of their reach. In contravening the law 
that drew Him to the center of gravity, He had also 
temporarily suspended the cohesion of the molecules 
that composed His body. 

Compelled to fly from His native place, Jesus went 
to the neighboring town of Cana, where He probably 
expected to obtain shelter from the friends or relatives 
for whom He had wrought his first miracle. He may 
have foreseen His possible ejection from Nazareth and 
have arranged beforehand that His mother and brethren 
and disciples should meet Him in Cana to decide where 
they should go next. When he arrived, there came 
in great distress an officer of Herod's Court, probably 
Chusa, the steward. His son was dying at Capernaum, 
five hours journey from Cana, and he begged that Jesus 
would come immediately to heal him. Jesus said, 
" Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise 
believe." Chusa's reply was a natural one. He did 
not wish to argue about belief. He merely cried, 
"Sir, come down ere my child die!" This showed the 
reality of his faith too touchingly to be resisted by the 
loving Saviour; but ere Jesus began to set forth, a 
message probably came to Him from the Spirit, a voice 
which he might now clearly distinguish from the 
thoughts of His human nature: "The child lives. He 
has just undergone a change, and the fever has left him." 
It may be that the power of mind reading that He had 
already shown, arising from his ability to place Himself 
in electrical affinity with the presiding mind of God in 
nature so extended itself that He was dimly conscious 



57 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

of all things; and when His attention was concentrated 
upon any one scene of activity, even though it were 
many miles distant, the dim consciousness became vivid 
and clear and, in the spirit, He saw the scene in some 
such way as God sees it from the central sphere. 
Whether Jesus merely received a rapid message of in- 
ternal suggestion, or yielded to an impulse that He did 
not fully understand, or whether he was able to transport 
His mind to Capernaum and into the sick boy's cham- 
ber, or to cure Him by a telepathic discharge of nerve 
force, He was able to say to the nobleman, " Go thy 
way. Thy son liveth." When the officer set out to 
return homewards, he met his servants coming to tell 
him that the crisis had passed; and the time of the change 
coincided exactly with the moment of our Saviour's 
utterance. It was probably due to Chusa's gratitude 
and also, perhaps, to the proximity of Bethsaida and 
the residence of Peter and Andrew and the majority of 
Christ's followers, that He now made a stay at Caper- 
naum. 

A memorable Sabbath day's work here comes to our 
notice. He taught in the synagogue during the morning 
and healed a demoniac or epileptic. Leaving the syn- 
agogue, He went to Peter's house at Bethsaida and cured 
Simon's wife's mother of fever; and toward evening a 
multitude of sick folk were brought to Him, and He 
healed them of all manner of diseases. In each case 
we are told that He " rebuked" the evil spirit which 
caused the disease. 

Epilepsy in the time of our Lord was rightly ascribed 
to its true cause, the working of an unseen baneful 

58 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

spiritual influence, whereas now, in the days of scientific 
research, the minds of men have been turned from 
fundamental and primary, unseen forces by the continued 
observation of the material and the seen. , Though the 
result has been fruitful of knowledge in the sphere of 
practical therapeutics and the adjustment of secondary 
and outward material phenomena, advanced thinkers 
are drawing nearer the spiritual point of view of the de- 
spised days of superstition. The mind is^the only 
permanent portion of man, not only from life Jo life but 
also from year to year. Since every_ part of our physical 
frame undergoes complete renewal, not every seven 
years or even every three years but every year, and since 
there is not any portion of our bone or muscle or 
membrane or any tissue whatsoever remaining in our 
composition now that was part of us two years ago, 
what in us is continuous? The power of recollection, 
the consciousness of identity? Yes; but we may not 
remember many things we have thesecret potentiality 
of recalling, were that latent power to be drawn 
out by suitable circumstances; and our consciousness of 
identity from year to year is never as full as it might be, 
were a wider and deeper symphony to be played on the 
chords of our memory by the invisible musician of In- 
finity. Remembering always that spiritual forces are 
the only dynamical springs of action, that material 
phenomena are mechanical and secondary and obey the 
commands of the hidden spirit with the accuracy and 
regularity of automata, we trace all changes of animal 
tissue to the brain and thence to Jhe invisible mover in 
the central sphere of Heaven. We can now clearly take 



59 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

up the sequence of cause and effect at the point where 
materialistic medical science loses it. Anatomists point 
out to us the peculiar structure of the brain and spinal 
chord and show us the ramifications of the nervous 
system. Physiologists explain the manner in which the 
organs of the human frame fulfil their functions of 
digestion and nutrition and secretion when a due 
measure of vital force is transmitted to them through 
the nerves from the brain. Pathologists compare the 
broken parts of the intricate machine with similar ones 
in a sound state, and lay greater stress year by year upon 
the nervous system and the adjustment of nerve centres 
in the brain as the prime cause of irregularity in the 
subordinate parts of the human structure. If the soul 
be the only permanent portion of our composition, and 
the body but. a cluster of atoms that it has the power 
to draw to itself out of its material environments, and 
hold around itself, is it not reasonable to believe that 
every disorganization of any portion of that cluster can 
only be permitted by a voluntary relaxation of the soul 
or mind itself ? Suppose that a piece of steel is driven 
with force into my arm. There is a relaxation of the 
coherence of the molecules of carbon, oxygen, nitro- 
gen, and hydrogen, or other constituents of flesh, suf- 
ficient to enable the steel to enter the same. As soon as 
the foreign substance is withdrawn, a process of integra- 
tion, begins. Leucocytes cling to the sides of the veins, 
pass through the walls thereof into the disturbed tissues, 
and begin to build up again and unite the torn parts. We 
ask the scientists for an explanation of these facts. 
They can describe the material circumstances ; but when 

60 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

we press them for the ultimate principle that underlies 
the process they are powerless. They say, "Nature 
works the cure". It is the healing of a wound by virtue 
of certain "natural laws" that they are too apt to 
consider not at all mysterious because they have tabu- 
lated and labelled them. They are disposed to think 
that they do not require to seek the primary cause. If 
we believe that there are within us two antagonistic 
beings, God, who unites us and preserves our bodies 
in their coherence, and Satan, who is endeavoring to 
destroy our integration, we shall be able to understand 
why "Nature works the cure". That portion of God 
which I call my soul, since it began to particularize itself 
as me, has kept about it a certain number of atoms 
making up my body. That portion of the Devil which 
is incarnated in me has always been trying to kill me 
by separating those atoms. He tries to starve me, but 
God causes food to be taken into my body and thereby 
builds up again the parts which Satan has destroyed. 
He tries to poison, burn, cut, tear, or otherwise injure 
me through the over-indulgence of my appetites or the 
disobedience of the voice of God directing all my actions 
to the preservation of my unity. All life-giving and 
life-sustaining motions are the direct work of my God- 
assisted soul. All sinful and deadly energies within me 
that tend to cause my disintegration are the work of 
God's opposite. Sickness, pain, anger, malice, laziness, 
and rebellion are caused by the Evil Spirit. When God 
has accomplished the purpose that He had in particular- 
izing Himself in my personality, He will allow Satan a 
temporary triumph, and old age, illness, or accident 

61 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION". 

will be [ :: to bring my material unit}' to an end. 

We believe, however, that death, or the temporary 
triumph of the Disintegrator, is only permitted for the 
purpose o: being overrule production of a higher 

unity. 

Epilepsy is ane :: the peculiar nervous affections in 
which the agency of the external spiritual Energy is 
most clearly demo::s:r^:: i. It is. in most cases. 
hereditary , and is at Iged by physicians to be 

frequently the result of consanguine marriages, or 
other forms of imprudent sexual relationship. It is 
obviously one of the numerous f enalties cttached to sin, 
ah the transgressi : n e been committed bv a 

rcmc:e ancestor, or by the person himself during a 
former existence on this earth or on the moon or some 
other planet :r astral sphere. Viewed from a material- 
ist: s:^:;ie Mnt, we liscover the aura or premonitory 
sensatieus. the sudden fall, the foaming and convulsi 
and the succeeding coma; and when we look for causes, 
we hnd, perhaps, an undue irritation or excitement of 
the nerve cen:res of the posterior portions ;: the brain, 
noth ad this, nothing to account for or explain 

the origin of the abnormal nerve-storm or disturbance. 
We must supply the p rimary cause from the region of the 
designing and spiritual motive energy that underlies all 
ei:s:::;ec:r:.;ing evils and that, with its opposing good 
force, uses cur brains as a mechanical battle-held. 
Accordingly we may stare the question thus ; All illness 
is the direct or indire;. - :f demoniacal possession, 
but epilepsy is that form of it in which the cause is most 
apparent to the public mind. We would, d priori^ expect 

62 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

therefore that, if our theory of the growth of the God- 
power in the man Jesus be correct, we should find 
Him exercising that unifying and life-preserving force to 
restore epileptics as setting forth to the common people 
the mercy and power of God, and we should expect Him 
to do so by publicly rebuking the Devil-power as 
we are told He did. If the skeptical ask how Jesus 
wrought the cure, we reply that it would be presump- 
tuous in us to speak dogmatically or positively in regard 
thereto; but we may with reverence point out several 
different theories arising from this hypothesis of the 
triumph of unity, or condensation, any one of which is 
quite possible. 

(i) Suppose the evil to have been the result of a 
cerebral lesion. We have seen that Jesus appeared to 
have the power of transmuting substances by the 
alteration of the affinities of their atoms. The breaking 
of tissue is but a relaxation of either chemical affinity or 
molecular cohesion or both. If Jesus had attained to 
sufficient knowledge of God's method of governing all 
things by regulating the affinities of their atoms, it 
would be an easy matter for Him to alter the polarity 
of the molecules disintegrated, and to cause thereby an 
immediate healing of the lesion and the consequent cure 
of the epilepsy. 

(2) If the evil were caused by the hypersensitiveness 
of some portion of the nervous organism, so that the 
undue excitation of the affected part caused an excessive 
discharge of nerve- energy, the problem of curing the 
epilepsy is merely the difficulty of removing the ab- 
normal sensitiveness of the part. If Jesus knew that 

63 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

all nerve- force was but the material manifestation of the 
spiritual force that unites, He would soon learn all the 
details of the application of that spiritual force to animal 
mechanism, and especially to the construction of nerve 
tissue. It would in fact be as clear to Him as ail other 
human problems are to us, when they are explained and 
understood. Diseases are mysterious to us because we 
know so little about them. Their mystery, and the difficul- 
ties that obscure them, will vanish as God reveals, through 
scientific or other channels of iUurnination, the methods 
by which His primary and spiritual forces work. We be- 
lieve that those secrets that God will reveal to us gradu- 
ally by His Holy Spirit working through poets, physi- 
cians, inventors, thinkers, and prophets, He revealed, for 
his own wise purposes, immediately and directly to His 
only begotten Son Jesus. To cure the sensitiveness of 
a certain part of the nervous organism might, perhaps, 
only require the removal, by an adjustment of polarity, 
of a few-misplaced molecules in the lining of a nerve. 
(3) If the cause of epilepsy be not some morbid con- 
dition of nerve tissue or brain matter, but an excess of 
positive over negative electric discharge, or a super- 
abundance of negative over positive, using these terms 
in the sense which is at present unsatisfactorily attached 
to them, ho vr simple would be the cure in the hands 
of one who could supplement the defective force from 
His own body ! One can communicate from his fingers 
an electric spark of sufficient power to fire a gas jet, by 
brushing his feet upon a heavy carpet. With what 
facility then could He, who understood the inner working 
of the spirit-force, through its electric material mani- 



04 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

festation, add to, or detract from the amount of force 
or energy in the debilitated or overcharged brain! 

We do not presume to set forth any one of these 
methods as that adopted by the Divine Galilean. It is 
only intended to indicate how many simple explanations 
could be given of His cures upon this theory of the 
special revelation of Unity or Condensation. To Him as 
the only begotten Son of God all cures lay within the 
range of what we call natural law, not by the contra- 
vention or annihilation of those uniformities that we 
see everywhere in God's working, but in harmonious 
accordance with these laws, and by means of an extra- 
ordinary knowledge of the conscious vitality that under- 
lies them. 

In the instance of Simon's wife's mother we can as 
readily see the possibility of a natural cure, as in the case 
of epilepsy. Physicians are tracing the prime cause 
of many fevers to a disturbance of equilibrium in the 
heat-regulating centres of the brain. The God-power, 
who adjusts the centrifugal and centripetal forces of 
the planets to such perfection of accuracy that their 
unity in a system is preserved, has arranged that 
the amount of nerve-force sent from the brain to 
the various parts of my physical organism by the 
vaso-motor system shall be so exactly measured 
and distributed that there shall be the proper tem- 
perature throughout me to maintain the various 
functions in the unity of a system which I call my body. 
The Devil-power wishes to disturb the adjustment and 
thereby to make me too hot. When the Devil tries to 
kill me with fever, he causes a rapid flow of energy to 

65 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the muscles of my heart. The latter responds by pump 
ing blood too rapidly through the lungs, where it at 
sorbs too much oxygen, and I am consequently burnec 
The inhibitory power which checks the excessive oxj 
genation of my system allows itself to be defeated fo 
the time. There may be cases where the fever owes it 
existence to the introduction of a foreign element or ti 
some form of germ virus, and then the fever symptom 
may be looked upon as the effort of the God-power fc 
expel the enemy, and so preserve my unity. Ineithe 
case it is manifest that the history of the fever is the stor 
of a conflict between two forces outside the individual 
and that their contact with him is mediately throug] 
the brain. The common notion is that disease germ 
are living organisms which come into contact with dea< 
tissue, enter it, make it their home, and so cause all th 
evil. We regard everything as having life. There i 
for us no such thing as dead matter or tissue that is no 
alive. Minute atoms, which are filled with God anc 
Satan, make all things what they are by their attractive 
ness or repulsiveness towards other atoms. All anima 
tissues are living. When the God-power desires tha 
I shall be healthy and strong, He arranges the atoms o: 
my body so that they have no afhnity for what are callec 
disease germs. 5 If He wishes to give Satan a temporary 
triumph over my unity for some wise purpose, He allow; 
Himself a'relaxation of His inhibitory nerve-force, anc 
there results throughout my system a complete change 
in the affinities of its molecules whereby they form some 
kind of union with certain particles external to myseli 
that medical men call bacteria. Whether the fever 

66 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

be idiopathic and spontaneously originating from a dis- 
turbance of cerebral adjustment, or, on the other hand, 
symptomatic and arising as a secondary effect of some 
local injury of the body, we must regard its true cause 
as a change in the chemical or electrical affinity of atoms, 
which change is brought about by the will of a personal 
and immanent God transmitted from the seat of His 
transcendent personality in Heaven to the remote and 
unimportant fragment of Himself known to us as the 
fever patient. If we believe that Jesus possessed, even 
to a slight extent, this mighty power of entering into 
God's inner working, will it not be credible that 
the touch of His hand cooled at once the parched 
frame, that the soft tones of His voice banished the 
mutterings of delirium ? So with steady pulse, thrilling 
with new vitality, Peter's wife's mother rose from her 
bed completely cured. 

We have presented to us now the picture of the bright 
proclamation of His mission on the shores of the 
Galilean Lake. We see Him preaching to the multi- 
tudes who thronged to hear the new prophet, for the 
fame of His cures had spread even to the remote parts 
of Syria, and blessings, soon forgotten, were doubtless 
showered upon Him by the inhabitants of the various 
towns of Galilee to which He went from time to time, 
making Capernaum or Bethsaida His headquarters. 
He obtained shelter at the house of His enthusiastic 
follower Simon Of the wonders which he wrought 
in Chorazin and Bethsaida He afterwards Himself spoke 
using words of stern denunciation upon the inhabitants, 
who had not repented, whereas the people of Sodom and 

6 7 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Gomorrah would have done so, had such evidences of 
God's power been shown to them. 

There is a 1 so here the incident of the extraordinary 
draught of fishes, which requires for its explanation 
only the superior insight of one that could detect the 
presence of a school by natural signs unobserved by 
others or of one that could at least see God's instincts 
moving these tiny creatures in search of food, and 
attract them through those instincts to the neighborhood 
of the boats of the weary disciples. 

It is probable that Matthew was called at or about 
this time. From its importance as a commercia center 
we may fair y infer that there would be in Capernaum 
one or more places for the coPecnon of taxes. Matthew 
had probably heard some of the discourses of Our 
Saviour, or had seen His remarkable cures, or had been 
won by His great compassion for the poor and suffering. 
It may be that Jesus had marked the intelli- 
gence of the tax-gatherer's mien, or the attentiveness 
with which he listened. Our Lord certainly had the 
highest powers of character- reading, and the command 
"follow me" was enough to induce Matthew to leave 
a lucrative calling without a moment's hesitation to 
follow his new Master. 



68 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS SET FORTH IN THE 
TEACHINGS OF CHRIST. 

After calling His apostles and teaching them from 
day to day, and healing the multitudes that came to 
Him from all parts of Galilee and from Decapolis and 
Judea and from beyond Jordan, He delivered to them 
the precepts of His unifying and condensing method 
on one of the peaks of a neighboring mountain. 
This unique discourse contained a statement of the 
blessedness of all things which make for unity. The 
object of all law is the preservation of the coherence 
either of the individual or of the race. Humility or 
"poorness of spirit", mourning or Godly sorrow, meek- 
ness, hunger after righteousness, mercy, pureness of 
heart, peacemaking, endurance of persecution and 
reviling for the sake of righteousness, all these are 
qualities which would preserve the individual and the 
race in perfect unity, were they universal . The opposites 
of these are disintegrating energies, which destroy the 
unity of men's bodies and keep man from man and 
nation from nation. These are pride, revelling, bold- 
ness, indifference to right, harshness, impurity, in- 
stigation of strife, retaliation of injuries. Therefore 
Our Lord declared blessings upon the poor in spirit, 
the meek, and those who followed the things that pro- 
mote and preserve unity. 

69 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Then the question suggested itself, What will be 
the relationship of these new ideas to the venerable Law 
that was given on Mount Sinai, not with words of gentle 
love like these, but with the awful signs of God's pres- 
ence in the natural phenomenon of thunder and light- 
ning? Anticipating perhaps this thought in the minds 
of His hearers, Jesus said, " Think not that I am come 
to destroy the Law or the prophets. I am not come to 
destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till 
Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no 
wise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled." The 
new "Kingdom of Heaven" that He had come to 
found should then be a continuation of the old covenant 
and a fulfilment thereof. Its supreme law should be 
Love; and in the application of that law, its members 
should have various degrees of perfection. He that 
was most loving, and holy, and the greatest in the King- 
dom of Heaven would naturally keep all the ordinances 
of the Law. 

The crowning distinction between the old dispensation 
and the new lay in the doctrine of non-resistance: 

" Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an 
eye, and a tooth for a tooth . But I say unto you that 
ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy 
right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any 
man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let 
him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel 
thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that 
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee 
turn not thou away. ; Ye have heard that it hath been 
said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine 



70 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies; bless 
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and 
pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute 
you." 

There can be no misunderstanding such plain lan- 
guage, except by the wilful closing of the eyes to un- 
pleasant truth. Tolstoy and others are right in teach- 
ing that any religion which encourages war of na- 
tions or of individuals is not the religion of Jesus. We 
have no right to affirm that Christ did not mean us to 
take these words literally. He lived up to them Him- 
self, and His Apostles and early followers did likewise. 
These principles, and these only, will promote unity, the 
goal to which the universe is being drawn. Everything 
in this world must be brought into oneness, and every 
planet or sphere in God's Creation must be united to 
our little earth in Heaven. The law given through 
Moses to men was external pressure preserving unity. 
Men were to be compelled by a power without them- 
selves to act in such a manner that they might co-exist 
as a social and national unit. The first four command- 
ments provide for the worship of the Supreme Power. 
The fifth secures the maintenance of family unity. 
Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, covetousness, 
which are forbidden by the remaining clauses of the 
Decalogue, are the most obvious disintegrating influ- 
ences that threaten social coherence. Love, the Gospel 
of the New Kingdom, should preserve unity by internal 
yearning for coherence. Men should be drawn by some- 
thing within themselves to act as the external power had 
before commanded, and should fulfil the Law, not be- 



7i 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

cause it was commanded but because they now desired 
and deliberately chose that path of duty which had 
become dear to them through a renewal of their nature. 
They thus from internal bias should choose the things 
which make for unity. The Law, therefore, is the 
pressure of men into unity from outside; the Gospel is 
the drawing of men into unity by the living centre. The 
latter will exceed the former many times over in co- 
hering power. While the former prohibited murder, 
the latter will gradually annihilate all anger and hate, 
which keep men apart and divide them, even though 
they be not carried to the length of totally disintegrating 
the unity of the individual by murder. The Law 
had forbidden adultery, which disintegrated the family, 
separating husband and wife and scattering their off- 
spring. The Gospel forbids the secret thought of evil, 
the continuous life of mental impurity, which injures the 
nervous system and impairs the individual's bodily 
unity. The Law had provided that strict justice should 
be meted out to the wrongdoer, in order that men could 
live together in a community and be secure as to their 
lives and property; but Jesus taught that he that would 
be perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect must be 
willing to sacrifice his life or property for the cause of 
unity; and that to those that would give themselves 
up to the "perfect law of love", their unity with 
the centre of the universe through His only begotten 
Son Jesus, should be a full and abundant reward; 
and, furthermore, that they should in time have, as 
an indirect consequence thereof, perfect oneness 
with their fellow-men and a consequent peace that 



72 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

should pass the understanding of those not expe- 
riencing it. 

As the one law of the new kingdom should be more 
searching and effective than the many precepts of the 
old dispensation, so its followers should be distinguished 
from the scribes and pharisees by their secret and in- 
ward adherence to it. Their alms must not be given 
publicly, and their prayers should be offered in private 
rather than with the false assumption of outward, 
pious observances. He then gave them our "Lord's 
Prayer", which many men assert would have proved 
His Divinity to their minds, if He had never said or done 
anything beside. It is an epitome of the Gospel of 
Unity or Condensation. Addressing God as our Father 
we incidentally affirm His personality, creatorship, and 
love for us. We locate the seat of His consciousness in 
the central sphere of the universe, when we add "which 
art in Heaven". In order that men may be united in 
love to Him they must reverence His name. We pray 
for the final coming of His completed Kingdom, for the 
day when all men shall be united in perfect brother- 
hood, and when all nations shall be federated, and God's 
will shall be done on the earth as it is now done on the 
central sphere. "Give us this day our daily bread" is 
intended to teach man that in the maintenance of his 
bodily unity by food he is dependent upon his oneness 
with God, but that he can rely upon that Heavenly 
unity to supply him with the means of preserving his 
material integrity, from day to day, and that he 
should not look beyond that, lest in his anxiety to 
care for his earthly unity he might disturb his unity 

73 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

with God. We ask -that our trespasses may be 
forgiven, or, that our. departures from oneness with 
God's will may be overlooked, and that we may be 
admitted back into God's unity, urging at the same 
time the fact that we are willing to be united in 
brotherly love with all that may have departed from 
loving unity with us. We ask in conclusion that God 
will not leave us in circumstances which threaten our 
bodily and spiritual integrity, and that He will deliver 
us from the Disintegrator. 

Continuing His discourse in language that has never 
been surpassed in loftiness and beauty, He warned them 
against ceremonious fasting in public, carefulness for 
the things of this world, hasty judgment of others, 
neglect or distrust of prayer, and false prophets, who 
should come with an exterior of piety, but whose fruits 
should show them to be inwardly vile and destructive. 
Lastly, He urged them to carry out the principles of the 
Gospel of Unity in their lives. If they were doers of 
His word, they should be like a man who builded a house 
on a solid foundation; and when disintegrating floods 
came, they could not break the unity of the structure. 
But if those that heard departed from and ceased to carry 
out these principles to action, they were like a man who 
built on sand; and when the rain came and the winds 
blew, the building was broken with a great fall. 

After He descended from the mountain, there met 
Him a leper crying, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst 
make me clean." Leprosy was a recognized type of 
sin. It was a visible disintegrator of the skin and 
bones, a loathsome gradual separation of cohering atom s 



74 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

oijhe body. It wasjransferable^by contagion. When 
we think how minute a germ inoculated into one's sys- 
tem will produce in time such disastrous results, we can 
easily imagine that, through the inoculation of the op- 
posite principle by contact, a unifying and building- 
up process might be begun that would in time cure 
the leprosy. We can further believe that, if Jesus un- 
derstood Satan's disintegrating principle in all its work- 
ings and was, to some extent, master of the cohering 
force of God's working, He could by His touch not only 
communicate one germ of unifying power that would 
require time to propagate itself and effect a cure, but 
also at once impart as many germs or degrees of the 
uniting force as would be necessary to vitalize and 
purify every atom of the man's diseased frame 
instantaneously. Our Lord's touch of the leper was a 
breach of the Jewish Law, but it was a vindication of the 
New Gospel of Unity. The object of the law was to 
preserve the unity of the State and the material unity 
of the individual. Yet in the case of leprosy the Law 
was powerless to check disintegration. Its hygienic reg- 
ulations only aimed at preventing the spread of the dis- 
ease. Here was a case where contact would not lead to 
disintegration but to unity. Hence Jesus broke the Law, 
because He superseded its working by a more effective 
power. He took pains however to show His regard for 
the Levitical usage, by ordering the man to go to the 
priest and make the accustomed offering _and secure 
his guarantee of cleanness.? 

From Capernaum Jesus went to Nain ^His res- 
toration of the widow's son was the greats t exercise 



75 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

oi His new powers He had yet attempted. Wonder- 
ful as it seems that a man should have power to bring 
back breath to the lungs, circulation to the coagulated 
blood, and vitality to the lifeless body, we have seen that 
His previous miracles clearly prophesied this, the great- 
est of them all. We have observed that, upon our hy- 
pothesis of condensation or unity all life is a continuous 
inhalation towards the centre of the universe; that no 
other rational explanation of it can be given than the in- 
dwelling of the World-Spirit throughout His creation; 
that life is His breath of cohering love, known to us as 
chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, and gravitation 
in its lower aspects, and as beauty, goodness, and 
truth in its higher. By love Jesus rescued the son of 
the widow of Nain from incipient disintegration, even 
as by love He is now raising the whole race from death 
unto life, from diversity into unity, from antagonisms 
of race, color, sex, creed, and prejudice to the unity 
of a single man — Himself. It would require but a few 
germs of the cohering force to repair the injured 
machinery of the young man's body, and to set to 
work again the streams of living animals that collec- 
tively we call blood, thinking its teeming millons are 
one substance, because our eyes are too clumsy to per- 
ceive their differences and their tiny operations. The 
blood is the whole body. Some of the little animals 
group themselves together, form a society of their own, 
elect their rulers, arrange the laws and constitution of 
their active commonwealth, and we call them bone. 
Other little towns and cities we call nerve and mus- 
cle, skin and hair. The real cause of all these won- 

76 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

derful proceedings, the presence of the Omnipotent 
God, is ignored. The mystery is explained by one 
word, " secretion"! The wise men that explain every- 
thing by science are apparently quite satisfied with 
themselves when they declare that the various parts of 
the body secrete their elements from the blood. Why, 
we ask, do they so secrete ? Why do the atoms unite 
together in a certain way to form nerve, and in a dif- 
ferent way to form flesh ? They cannot answer. They 
say something about the "laws of nature", and dismiss 
the subject to the realms of metaphysics, or theology, or 
poetry. 

As our object is not to give a complete exposition of 
the life of Jesus, but merely to apply to its main features 
our hypothesis of the triumph of unity or condensation 
as an explanatory and corroborative theory, we may 
here consider the other two instances in which He exer- 
cised His supreme power of restoring the dead to life. 
The case of Jairus's daughter resembles that which we 
have just been considering, inasmuch as the body was 
in each case probably still in a state of unity. It is not 
likely that mortification had set in. When death 
occurs from the loss of respiration, or the stoppage of 
the heart, either gradually or suddenly, without any 
breaking of the machinery of the physical system, we 
would imagine the possibility of resurrection to be the 
easiest of accomplishment. It would involve the mere 
stimulation of the respiratory centres or of the centres 
which control the nerves giving action to the muscles 
of the heart, and then, to prevent relapse, the removal 
of the cause of the stoppage of vitality. In a few seconds 



77 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the impoverished blood might be replenished by lively 
corpuscular inhabitants, and the work of renewing and 
building up the tissues of the whole body actively 
begun. 

Many incline to the opinion, from the description 
given of the raising of Jairus's daughter, that the damsel 
was only in a trance, that Jesus referred to this when 
He told them that the girl was not dead but sleeping. 
It is not necessary, however, to accept His words 
literally, especially when we are told that the onlookers 
knew that she was dead. We are not informed in 
either case as to the cause of death. 

The restoration of Lazarus was doubtless a more 
complicated process, as mortification had already set in. 
As soon as the integrity of the system is loosened by 
what we call death, the microscopic inhabitants of the 
little bodily universe begin to look about preparatory 
to migrating. They separate in different directions, 
each one following some law of attraction in accordance 
with its own nature and of its own choice. Most of 
them go away in such tiny and loose forms that we 
cannot see them, and, though we give the name of some 
gas to the collective exodus, we are only veiling our 
ignorance of their real proceedings, and purposes, 
and motives, by clumsily giving them a title. Yet to 
one who has been let into the secret of these little 
microbes and germs, and of their motives and affinities, 
how easy would it be to check mortification! The little 
animals must be made to stay at home. There is a 
trifling step from repulsion to attraction. It merely 
involves a change of polarity. To one admitted by the 

78 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Ruler of all, who governs the universe from Heaven 
by this one law of polarity, into the consciousness of 
His identity with that Ruler's own Godhead and methods, 
how easy would it be to check the disintegration of the 
body, to bid its inhabitants once more take up their 
places in the system, and, having the brain and bodily 
machinery again in running order, to call back the de- 
parted spirit to take possession in the words, "Lazarus 
come forth!" 

There are two important incidents in our Lord's life 
that we must not pass over without comment. These 
are the feeding of the multitudes and the transfiguration. 
In regard to the first of these, we need only point out 
the connection between it and Christ's temptation to 
change stones into bread and the subsequent proof of 
His ability to transmute substances in the changing of 
water into wine. The fact that Jesus was able to feed 
five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, and 
that the fragments left over were more than the original 
amount of food, should, in view of our d priori ex- 
pectation from what had gone before, satisfy us that 
Jesus actually transformed the elements about Him 
directly into food, as, we anticipate, all men will in the 
distant future be able to do. Of the Transfiguration 
we will speak further in the Chapter on the " Place of 
Departed Spirits." 

The time was now drawing nigh for the final proclama- 
tion of the Kingdom of Peace. Since the first visit to 
Jerusalem, Jesus had traversed Galilee, Judaea, Ituraea, 
and Peraea, preaching the good news of unity with God, 
restoring the unity of diseased bodies, and performing 
other works of mercy. 

79 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

He had chosen and trained twelve Apostles, to whom 
He would entrust the proclamation of His religion and 
the organization of His Church. He had called together 
seventy followers and sent them out, by twos, to an- 
nounce the establishment of the new era and to awaken 
universal interest and arouse expectation. The Pass- 
over was again drawing nigh; and now the whole atten- 
tion of Palestine was centred on Him, and awaiting the 
assumption of His rule. 

After a journey through Peraea, He arrived at Bethany, 
on the East side of the Mount of Olives, and took up 
his residence at the house of Martha and Mary where 
He made His home for the few remaining days of His 
life on earth. His arrival occurred on the evening of 
Friday, the eighth day of Nisan, March 31st, A. D. $c. 
It is likely that many of the pilgrims coming through 
Peraea, on their way to the Passover Feast at Jerusalem, 
had attached themselves to His train, and some of these 
would probably erect booths and tents on the West 
slope of the Mount of Olives to wait for His trium- 
phant entry into the city. Others would, doubtless, go 
forward into Jerusalem, where they might have had 
friends with whom they could lodge during the Passover 
Week or obtain shelter at the inns and hostelries; and 
these would probably cam- on the word that Jesus of 
Nazareth had come down through Peraea, and had 
made a halt outside the city, at Bethany. 

The following day, being Saturday, the Jewish 
Sabbath, was spent in quiet retirement with His friends 
and, in the evening, some of His followers were invited 
to °nter the house and partake of supper. Lazarus, 

So 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

being himself a living attestation of the Divine powers 
of the Galilean, would be looked upon with great in- 
terest by the assembling pilgrims, and, no doubt, his 
presence converted many of the skeptical, and made 
tfom join the train. The fact that Matthew and Mark 
speak of this feast as having taken place at the house 
of Simon the Leper may not be difficult to understand. 
Sinon may have been the father of Mary and Martha 
and Lazarus, a man fairly well known, who had either 
dielof leprosy, or had been removed from home on 
acount of it , so that the house would be known as that 
of ' Simon the Leper", though it was now occupied only 
by lis children. 

luring the feast occurred the singular act of annoint- 
ing which was so fitting at this juncture. On the mor- 
row Jesus was to proceed into the city and proclaim 
Hiirself the Messiah, a prophet, priest, and king. 
Thee three offices were included in His title of u The 
Chriit", the annointed one. It was the annointing of 
a prcphet, who should foretell to men their destiny, and 
at th; same time, provide the way to accomplish it, 
namdy, the unity of all men on the earth by means of 
their growing communion with the one God and Father 
of all It was the annointing of mankind's great High 
Priest who should soon offer up Himself as an "atone- 
ment', a sacrifice, Holy, and undefiled, and acceptable 
to Goc, in full payment for the sins of the whole world, 
and threby should fulfil all the symbols and types given 
to men hrough the Mosaic dispensation, and who should 
enter iito the veil on Calvary, and sit down on the right 
hand o: God, the Father, evermore to intercede for us. 

81 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

It was the annointing of the King of the Jews, their 
Deliverer, for whose advent they had been hoping with 
an expectation which had deepened in its intensity 
since their return from exile, and which reached ts 
climax precisely at the time of this particular Passover. 
We see, from the anxiety of the chief priests, the popular- 
ity that was beginning to surround our Lord. 

There was present at the feast one whose sordid 
nature was to be the Devil's instrument in the comng 
disintegration. Judas, who carried the money bigs, 
cried out at the sight of so generous a gift outpoired 
upon the Master. Then, to excuse himself, he '.m- 
mediately began to assume an excessive regard for the 
poor. Our Lord, reading the working of his mind, re- 
buked him, and commended Mary for what she lad 
done: "Why trouble ye the woman? Let her abne. 
She hath wrought a good work upon me, in that sh< did 
it for my burying. For ye have the poor always with 
you but me ye have not always." These words ae of 
the utmost importance here, because they show that 
Jesus, while about to make His triumphal entry 01 the 
morrow, was perfectly aware of the result. He tnew 
that death awaited Him. Any merely earthly ref<|rmer 
would not have so discouraged his followers, at iicha 
critical moment, even if he foresaw an unfavorabe and 
fatal reception. It is the occurrence of ingenucls re- 
marks like this, when viewed with the whole t&or of 
His life, which renders it so highly improbable tlat He 
could have been merely a reformer that designee to set 
up an earthly kingdom and, having failed, was cucified 
for high treason. He had, on several occasion* fore- 

82 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

told His death, and had, doubtless, known perfectly 
how He would be treated, ever since He had read the 
description of His end given by Isaiah in his Fifty- 
third Chapter. 

Either through pique at this rebuke, or because it had 
been in his mind for some time, Judas that night stole 
out on his base purpose of betrayal. Having made his 
way to Jerusalem and obtained access to the house 
of Caiaphas, he found willing purchasers for his 
treachery. The unholy compact was soon completed. 
His Lord was sold for thirty pieces of silver, and the 
wretched incarnation of the Evil Spirit made his way 
back through the darkness, out over the Mount of 
Olives, to the loving companions who still trusted him. 

We can imagine the stir and enthusiasm about 
Bethany early on the following morning. There would 
be intense excitement, especially amongst those who 
most firmly believed Jesus to be the Messiah and who 
looked for the immediate inauguration of that wonder- 
ful period about which the wildest fancies existed. 

Those who had been associated with Our Lord in His 
triumphant march through the country wherein He 
proclaimed Himself the Messiah, and attested His claim 
by the very acts which the people expected to take place 
in the New Dispensation, such as healing the lame and 
blind and leprous, would confidently look for the other 
wonderful proceedings that the prophets had foretold 
and the Rabbis exaggerated. They would look towards 
the top of the Mount of Olives and expect to see the 
peaks of Carmel, Tabor, and Sinai closing in on them 
with clouds from the North and West. They would be 

83 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 



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THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

races honor the humble procession of the Prince of 
Peace, and despise, as remains of a disappearing bar- 
barism, the gorgeous pageantry of conquering brute 
force. It may be asked, however, why Jesus, who knew 
that He would not inaugurate the earthly Kingdom 
which His followers expected, did not tell them so. 
We reply that on many occasions He did, but they could 
not understand Him. The minds of the Jews were so 
moulded by their surroundings, and previous history, 
that they could form no other conception of the Messiah 
than that of an earthly conqueror whose Kingdom 
should be one of national majesty, with Palestine as its 
centre. He had tried to teach them that the Kingdom 
of God was internal and spiritual. It was something 
different from what they expected. It would work 
silently like leaven, until, by contact, it influenced the 
whole world. Even the most faithful amongst them 
failed to grasp His meaning. We see this in the foolish, 
but pardonable anxiety of the mother of Zebedee's 
children, that her boys, who had been granted the most 
intimate personal association with the Master, should 
sit, the one on His right hand, the other on His left, when 
He came into His Kingdom. To us , who look back 
over the centuries, the skein of History is becoming 
fairly well unravelled. We can now infer, with a 
tolerable degree of probability, the future course, in out- 
line at least, of mankind's development. We can see 
the drift of all things towards unity, the gradual con- 
vergence, under the Holy Spirit, of all nations towards a 
universal federation, and the reign of absolute brother- 
hood, through Christ, upon this earth. We can further 

*5 



THE PHH 3SOFHV '7 INT1 SAT1 1 1 

minds of aE elop in the consciousness of their 

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ie 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

loved His race and the city of His people. He doubtless, 
recalled the visits paid in His childhood to the Temple 
and the many subsequent journeys to the Feasts in the 
Holy City. Thoughts of His fond pride, His youthful 
patriotism, thronged upon Him. The intense yearning 
of His heart for sympathy, the outflowing of His Divine 
love for His selfish and ignorant brothers moved Him 
with mingled longing and compassion. Above all, the 
proud majesty of the magnificent city, then the wonder 
of men, soon to be humbled to the very dust by the 
Romans, — the awful horrors of the siege of Titus rush- 
ing before His prophetic vision, — scenes frightful enough 
to make the reader shudder after nineteen centuries — 
a doomed Jerusalem driven on by the Devil to work 
out her own destruction, through the hard-hearted 
stupidity with which the Disintegrator filled her 
people, — these and many other thoughts rushed 
through His mind and shook His frame with waves of 
bitterest emotion. None but a brutal heart can watch 
this picture unmoved. The infinite pathos of His cry 
has no parallel in history : ' ' Oh ! Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! 
Thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that 
are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy 
children together as a hen doth gather her brood under 
her wings, and ye would not!" 

Nothing so completely refutes the "disappointed polit- 
ical reformer" theory as this unexpected outburst. If 
Jesus had been a scheming pretender, who expected to 
set up a government at Jerusalem, or even a pure-minded, 
but self-deceived, enthusiast, who dreamed of establish- 
ing a reign of spiritual grandeur, this was the moment 

87 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

at which it would have been impossible to refrain from 
a cry of triumph. Surrounded as He was by the 
"Hosannas" of the acclaiming multitude, amidst the 
zeal and wild joy of His companions, the sudden sight 
of Jerusalem with all her embattled towers and glittering 
domes, could not have failed to cause a thrill of pride 
and gratified ambition in any human political idealist. 

The mournful tenderness of His exclamation accords 
with the Divine foresight of His next words, in which 
He unmistakably portrays the horrors of the Roman 
siege: "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in 
this thy day, the things that belong unto thy peace! — 
But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days 
shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a 
trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep 
thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the 
ground and thy children within thee, and they shall not 
leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou 
knewest not the time of thy visitation." 

Some of the scribes and pharisees had now joined the 
throng that was pouring out from the city to meet 
the procession. They suffered a pang of jealousy at 
every "Hosanna" shouted by the crowd. Unable to 
bear it longer, they said to Jesus, "Master rebuke Thy 
disciples," but He, with thoughts, which are too deep 
for us, of the constitution of nature and the subcon- 
sciousness of those objects which appear to us to be in- 
animate, and of the spirit-powers that dwell unperceived 
in rocks and trees and earthly elements, declared that 
if His followers should be silent the very stones would 
cry out. 

88 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

When the cortege reached the city walls and entered 
through one of the gates into the thronged streets, there 
appears to have been a slight diminution of enthus- 
iasm. As they passed along, the bystanders enquiied 
with curiosity in regard to the cause of the commotion, 
and who this person was, riding upon an ass. The 
answer was, " This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth." 
But where were the wonderful transformations that 
were to have taken place? Why did not the houses 
suddenly enlarge till their tops reached the clouds? 
Why were there no earthquakes, and no mountains 
flying through the air ? The zeal of the poor provincials 
became chilled in the presence of the crowds of curious 
onlookers. They began to feel that they might have 
been mistaken. As they drew towards the Temple the 
procession became thinner. No person stained with 
the dust of travel could approach the sacred Mount 
Moriah without cleansing and purifying himself. 
Whether through this cause, or on account of their lack 
of courage, or distrust, or, it may be, through a sense of 
awe, the followers of Jesus remained at a distance, or 
dispersed; and He entered the Temple alone. 

As upon the occasion of His former visit, none could 
withstand the strange power of His divine presence. 
He stood before the pompous priests and dignified 
pharisees, unarmed save by a handful of rushes, alone 
amidst a multitude of worshippers, vendors, and at- 
tendants. A sudden quiet fell upon the place and the 
babel of noises became hushed . Again the calm voice 
of denunciation was heard falling upon them with a 
stern power that compelled obedience. The avaricious 

89 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

hordes fled from their oxen and their money tables un- 
willing to face His glance. 

Then crowds began to flock around Him with approval. 
Sick persons were brought to Him to be healed. Words 
of marvellous wisdom and sweetness came from Him. 
Doctrines of sublime grandeur charmed and awed the 
attentive listeners. Once more the floodgates of en- 
thusiasm were loosed, and loud "Hosannas" were 
shouted, and taken up even by the children, perhaps 
by the trained boy choirs of the Temple. This exas- 
perated the chief priests and pharisees beyond measure, 
but they could do nothing to check the applause. 
Jesus added to their rage by quoting against them the 
second verse of the eighth psalm: "Out of the mouths 
of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise." 

There were present strangers from all parts^of the 
world. Among these were some Greeks who desired 
to speak with Jesus. They came to Philip and through 
him sought an interview. Philip consulted with Andrew, 
and together they approached the Master and informed 
Him of the wish of the foreigners. The answer of our 
Saviour agrees with the tradition regarding this mes- 
sage. According to stories, that have their founda- 
tion only outside the canon, they were emissaries 
from King Abgarus of Edessa offering Jesus an asylum 
in his country, stating that this monarch had heard of 
our Lord's miracles, and that His life was threatened 
by the Jews. Whether there is truth in all the details 
of the story we know not, but that they bore an offer of 
assistance and escape from His threatened fate we may 
fairly infer from our Lord's reply: "Verily, verily, I 



90 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
and die, it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth 
much fruit. " Which might be interpreted in the 
language of our theory of unity or integration as follows : 
Verily, verily, I say unto you, in order that one grain 
of wheat may result in the uniting ofjmany scattered 
particles of nitrogen and carbon, andjother elements, 
into a hundred grains of wheat, it is necessary that the 
smaller unity of the single grain shall break up, through 
the work of the Disintegrator, into its elemental parts, 
i. e., shall be cast into the ground and die; so, in order 
that the individual incarnation of God in My person may 
bear fruit, and develop into the incarnation of God in 
the whole race, it is necessary that the Disintegrator 
should be allowed a temporary triumph over My in- 
dividual unity, or bodily life, and hence I must die; 
therefore you may tell Abgarus, or any other person who 
sees that My life is threatened and desires Me to flee from 
danger, that I must not say, " Father save Me from this 
hour," but rather, "Father glorify Thy name." And 
the sacred narrator tells us there was heard a voice 
from Heaven saying, "I have both glorified it and will 
glorify it again." The people who heard could not 
distinguish the words. Some said that it thundered, 
and others, having heard more distinctly, said "An 
angel spake to Him." 

So noble and winning were the words of the Divine 
Son of Man that even some of the chief priests believed 
in Him, but most of them, calculating Sadduces or 
stupid Pharisees, blinded by fear and dislike, only sought 
the more to compass His ruin. He was obliged to re- 



al 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

tire quietly towards Bethany that night, possiblv sleep- 
ing in the open air, or under the shelter of a friendly 
grove, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE TEMPORARY TRIUMPH OF THE DISINTEGRATOR IN 
THE SUFFERINGS AND DEATH OF CHRIST. 

On His way to the Temple the following morning, 
Jesus, by causing the barren fig tree to wither, gave the 
world an illustration of the judgment that was to come 
upon the city before Him. Jerusalem had been barren, 
and should be cut down by the sword and dried up by 
the fire of war. Those who criticise this miracle as an 
ebullition of petty impatience fail to see it in its spiritual 
bearings. The Gospel narrators themselves, perhaps, 
did not realize fully our Saviour's meaning. It might 
have been that He was an hungred physically, but He 
was starving, inspirit, for recognition by His race and 
for the love of His fellow-men. He thirsted for their 
uplifting and righteousness. They had been God's 
vineyard, as He elsewhere taught them explicitly, and 
when He came to them looking for fruit, He found noth- 
ing but leaves. The withering of the tree was not child- 
ish resentment against an inanimate object, but a 
majestic act pregnant with historical and spiritual signifi- 
cance. It further served to teach His followers the 
mysterious power of faith. In explaining to them the 
potency by means of which He had been able to destroy 
the coherence of the tree as an organic unity, He placed 
on record the bold statement that, if they had even a 
small portion of that peculiar force, they could say to a 

93 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

mountain, "Be thou removed and be thou cast into the 
sea," and it would straightway obey them. These 
words have given rise to much discussion, especially 
amongst earnest Christians. It is asked why no man 
has ever had such faith. Thousands of the followers of 
Christ possess a deep and strong belief in God, in Jesus 
as divine, in the immanence of the Supreme Being 
throughout nature, and in His providential government 
of all things ; yet they are not only unable to move moun- 
tains, but they cannot lift more than a few hundred 
pounds without mechanical appliances. In order to 
get glimpses of our Lord's meaning we must understand 
two things: first, what this faith is; and, secondly, how 
we may come to have it. 

With regard to the first point, we must know that this 
kind of faith is not an attitude of the mind, either of 
acceptance or of rejection, towards any proposition, nor 
is it merely a general trust or reliance of the finite soul 
upon the Infinite God. It is a faculty of perception by 
which the individual is empowered to look beneath the 
material into the spiritual, to gaze into the unseen 
through the seen. It is the faculty of apprehending 
the real under the actual or phenomenal. It does not 
see nature in its dualistic appearances of antagonisms, 
but dives straight down into the underlying oneness. We 
would define it as the "faculty of apprehending God as 
unity 7 ." God is the Absolutely One throughout the 
universe ; and our definition is merely a way of describing 
the faculty by which we apprehend Him. The modes 
by which the Divine One manifests Himself in nature 
are called, in scientific parlance, chemical affinity, mole- 

94 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

cular cohesion, and gravitation. We do not say that 
God is gravitation, but that gravitation is always a 
manifestation of God. Faith may thus be considered 
as a faculty that enables us properly to perceive and 
understand gravitation as a spiritual force. Our Lord, 
accordingly, meant that, if we possessed the smallest 
fraction of the insight into the unseen which He had, we 
should know that what we call gravitation is merely a 
name that we have given to a universal law of Divine 
working. We should be able to see that the force which 
maintains a mountain in its place is the power of the 
uniting God. We should recognize, at the same time, 
our own partial identity with that God, and should be- 
come aware of our own control of nature, as being parts 
of Him Who governs it. The first power we should have 
when this faith had been given us would be the ability to 
understand and control the law of gravitation. We 
could suspend it at will. To lift a mountain may seem 
an immense task for a man; but it is only necessary to 
alter the polarities of the atoms that compose it, and the 
mass will lift itself. At present the molecules of earth 
are so influenced that they attract each other mutually; 
and the earth attracts the hill, as a body, to itself, and 
is, in proportion, attracted by it. Set the invisible 
currents agoing in the opposite direction, substitute 
electric energy for electric force, and the particles of 
the mountain will repel each other. Further, the im- 
mense mass itself will be repelled by the earth. If you 
wish it, the mountain will lift itself bodily from the 
earth and cast itself into the sea, in response to your will- 
power. 



95 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

To understand our Lord's meaning we must, secondly, 
learn how we become possessed of this faith. It is ob- 
vious that Jesus Himself, and those immediately con- 
nected with Him, were the only ires that have had 
enough of it to work these wonders. Yet we are not to 
cease striving after it, though wc cann : t exf ect to possess 
it by our own euorts. We cannot hope to attain His 
degree of holiness and freedom from sin, yet we must 
set that before us as the ideal at which we aim. It 
comes to men as God chooses to give it This kind of 
faith, i. e.. power, is not of man but of God. It pleases 
our Ruler to work gradually. He gives to one man 
sufficient discernment into reality to enable him to 
play his part in the plan of development, that and no 
more. Moses. Mahomet, Luther. Piato.audHegel have 
had a moiety of this faith given them, but : ne not so large 
as a mustard seed. Only Christ and His Apostles had 
the full measure of faith. As we expand and grow in 
beaun* goodness, and truth, however, our power of re- 
ceiving this faculty in trees es. Through the work oi the 
Holy Ghost in men's hearts, all who have been chosen 
of God to be saved in this era will be brought up into 
the full stature of Christ, to know and do as He 
thought and did. St. Paul had the clearest grasp of 
this idea because he possessed the most thorough 
conception of unity. He emphasizes the fact that 
faith is "of grace, 5 ' /. e., it comes to man as a gift 
from God, and is not something which we can attain 
ourselves, though we must strive after it. It is neces- 
sary that we should place ourselves in an attitude 
towards Him that will facilitate our reception of it 

90 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

when He chooses to make us the honored vessels to con- 
tain such a treasure. The great mistake of the 'faith 
cure " agitation, of the present day, lies in the ignoring 
of this important fact. The cure of all diseases by 
faith was accomplished by Jesus, and will become the 
property of all the elect some day. but it suits the pur- 
pose of God now to grant that power gradually. We 
cannot have it by our own will, but only as God wills; 
and He appears to desire us to walk by medicines and 
ether material means for the present. At the close of the 
laut day of our Lord's teaching in the Temple, He told 
His followers that after two days would come the Feast 
of the Passover, and then He should be betrayed to be 
crucified 

By a singular coincidence, at the very time when He 
was foretelling this on the top of the mountain, the 
Chief Priests and the scribes and elders, having met 
together at the house af Caiaphas, had decided not to 
take Him on the Feast Day, lest there should be an up- 
roar among the people. They did not understand the 
wonderful pre- establishment of harmony by which the 
Lamb of God should be slain by them for the sins of 
the whole world, on the very day when 200,000 lambs 
should be slain for the sins of the Jews of Palestine, 
types and their antitype. Before the foundation of the 
world, when the whole plan of the universe, and of mans 
part in it, lay in the Divine Mind , it had been arranged 
that they should die simultaneously. Our Saviour 
knew His own nature and mission too well, and foresaw 
the future of the New Covenant in His Blood too clearly 
to be uncertain about the day of His crucifixion. Hence 



97 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

a way opens up that determines the assembled priests 
and elders to take the step on the Feast Day after all. 
This was the further offer of the traitor Judas to betray 
Our Lord on the following Thursday evening. 

Christ spent Wednesday in retirement at Bethany, and 
on Thursday He sent some of His followers into the city 
to procure a room in which they were to eat their last 
Passover. That evening they made their way quietly 
into Jerusalem; and He assembled theTwelve to inaug- 
urate the mystery of the New Covenant, the Feast of 
the Body and Blood of the Lamb of God. As they 
reclined on their mats around the dish of food, He re- 
buked them for their worldly desire of precedence and 
the mutual jealousies that He perceived amongst them. 
He wished to destroy the germs of disintegrating pride 
that He saw threatening their unity 7 . To show that 
He who is greatest in the New Kingdom must be the 
servant of all, He washed their feet, the work of the 
meanest slave. 

The philosophy of the sacrament which He thereupon 
instituted is in strict accordance with our legitimate a 
priori expectations. Its object was the establishment of 
a unifying process whereby men should be drawn into 
oneness with each other by their absorption of one body 
and blood, one spirit becoming gradually incorporated 
in the whole race, by which all individual souls should 
be integrated into one. The whole Christian System is a 
revelation of unity. As the word "Atonement" signifies 
the unity between man and God accomplished by 
Christ's death, so the word "Communion" indicates 
the unity between all men, now being gradually brought 

9 8 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

about by the working of the Holy Spirit, through the per- 
petuation of Christ's death, symbolically and sacrific- 
ially, in the consecration and consumption of bread and 
wine wherein He constantly reincarnates Himself for the 
purpose. The thought of the unity of all men in Him, 
and of Himself in them, was uppermost in the mind of 
Jesus. He had seen that God is the Absolute unity that 
underlies all diversities, from whom all things have come, 
and into whom they shall all ultimately become drawn . 
He had grown up to a realization of His own identity 
with God, and knew that He and His Father were one. 
He understood that His mission was to unite all men to 
God and to each other, so that there should be, on the 
earth, one spirit in a multitude of united bodies, or, 
viewed as a federated race, one spirit in one body. He 
had established a visible symbol of this in the Sacra- 
ment of the Body and Blood, the most striking that 
could be conceived, for it represented that they actually 
ate His Body and drank His Blood, that He might be- 
come part of their body and they be part of His. He 
continued to illustrate the closeness of this connection 
by describing the relation of the branches to the vine. 
In order that they may have life, they must abide in the 
vine, as one organism. If they did not, the sap, which 
was the principle of unity, would not continue to in- 
vigorate the branches, and they should disintegrate and 
perish. Each branch, in other words, can only preserve 
its unity by remaining in the wider unity of the vine- 
After having told them of the Comforter, Whom He 
would send to guide them into all truth, He said that in 
a little while they should not see Him, and again in a 



99 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

little while they should see Him, because He was going 
to the Father. When He found that this mystified them, 
He declared plainly that He had come forth from the 
Father and had come into the world, and, that now He 
would leave the world and go back to the Father. They 
said that they understood Him, and that they now were 
sure He knew all things, and believed that He had come 
forth from God. Jesus sadly reminded them that, 
though at this time they appeared enthusiastic, in a few 
hours they would desert Him and leave Him alone; and 
yet not alone, because the Father was with Him. He 
told them to be of good cheer. In the world they should 
have tribulation, but he had overcome the world; and 
then He lifted up His eyes to Heaven and uttered 
the wonderful prayer that sets forth unity as the 
"raison d'etre" of all God's Plan, past, present and 
future, in the creation, redemption, and sanctifka- 
tion of humanity. 

"Father,'' He said, "the hour is come. Glorify Thy 
Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast 
given Him power over all flesh, that He should give 
eternal life to as many as thou hast given Him. .And this 
is life eternal, that thev might know thee. *** Sanctifv 
them through thy truth : thy word is truth. As thou hast 
sent Me into the world; even so have I also sent them 
into the world ; and for their sakes I consecrate Myself 
to My work that they also may be set apart for their 
mission, through the truth. Neither pray I for these 
alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me 
through their word: that they all may be one, as thou, 
Father, art in Me, and I in thee, that they also may be 



ICO 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

one in us; that the world may believe iliat thou hast sent 
Me. And the glory which thou gavest Me I have given 
them; that they may be one, even as we are one; I in ihem t 
and thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and 
that the world may know that thou hast sent Me, and 
hast loved them, as thou hast loved Me. Father, I 
will that they also, whom thou hast given Me, be with Me 
where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou 
hast given Me : for thou lovedst Me before the foundation 
of the world. Oh righteous Father, the world hath not 
known thee: but I have known thee, and these have 
known that thou hast sent Me. And I have declared 
unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love 
wherewith thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I 
in them." 

Passing out over the brook Kedron, they came to the 
Garden of Gf.thsemane. Of the mysterious agony, the 
most terrible example of suffering known to us, we may 
say little. Our Lord, evidently, suffered more in the spir- 
itual conflict with His human nature, in that fight with 
the Powers of Evil, alone in the shade of those trees, than 
He felt when the cruel nails pierced His hands and 
feet. Those that see in this the shrinking of weakness 
are met by the calm endurance of His subsequent 
tortures. It was not the fear of torment, or of death, that 
caused those awful throes. It was the struggle of the 
human element with the Divine. Every fibre of the 
man resented the cruelty, the sin, the burning injustice, 
the unparalleled barbarity of His coming fate. Was 
it easy to bear all this for such ungrateful, selfish men? 
For a righteous man one might perad venture dare to 



IOI 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

die, but for this hopelessly mean and barbarous race 
for those that were thirsting to shed the blood of Him 
that had endured so much only to save them from sin 
and its penalties and to elevate them to a higher life? 
We are apt to think that, because He led a sinless life, it 
was easy for Him to do so, or that He could not have 
sinned, if He so desired. This is not true. He could 
have done so; but He was so good that His will would 
not choose sin. He was a thorough man, and, as such, 
the ingratitude and sins of His fellow-men hurt Him 
as they hurt us. Every human instinct cried out against 
this self-surrender. He doubtless reflected upon the 
powers which He could command to destroy His 
enemies and protect Himself. We prefer to regard the 
scene of Christ's suffering in Gethsemane as the last 
struggle of Satan to overcome the Son of God. No 
wonder the agony was frightful. To have such power, 
and not only to refrain from using it, but meekly to under- 
go these scoffs, and scourgings ! To die the death of a 
criminal ! Satan is almost as powerful as God ; and every 
vile passion of humanity — ever} 7 ungrateful thought — 
every ignorant brutality — of mankind, was pressed into 
the Devil's service, to fight the pure spirit of the Divine 
One, through the human side of His nature. Never has 
earth witnessed such a conflict. To obey the Divine 
within Him, and to reject, to spurn, to crush the human, 
that was the struggle in the solitude. 

When the tramp of an approaching mob made itself 
heard, and torches began to glimmer through the trees, 
Jesus, thoughtful for the safety of His sleeping followers, 
stepped forward — that He might be the more quickly 



1 02 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

recognized by Judas — and gave Himself up to His cap- 
tors, lest the beloved disciples should suffer violence. 
The power of His majestic presence is seen in the fact 
that He was obliged to declare His identity twice, before 
they recovered from the shock sufficiently to approach. 
When He had stipulated that His friends should be 
allowed to depart, and had healed the wound inflicted 
by the rashness of Peter, the cowardly horde began to 
realize that He really stood before them in meek sub- 
mission. As soon as they were sure that they had noth- 
ing to fear f iom Him, they seized Him and hurried to 
the house of Caiaphas, where the plot had been hatched. 
The disciples had forsaken Him and fled. A youth 
had followed, partially dressed, as if roused suddenly 
from sleep; but he was suspected, seized, and only 
escaped by leaving his garment in the hands of his 
captors. Peter, as we know, followed afar off and by 
his little part in the drama gave us a realistic corrobora- 
tion of the truth of the whole story. The naturalness 
of the scene, the encounter with the maid who recog- 
nized him, the startled denial, the reiteration of his 
deception, the crowing of the cock in the early morning, 
and his sudden remorse, as the warning of His Master 
came to his mind, these would have been masterpieces 
of fiction, if they had not been true. How clearly they 
bring that far-away night before us! The lapse of 
nineteen centuries has only intensified our appreciation 
of every detail in it. We can see him rushing, in an 
agony of remorse, out into the darkness; with the loving 
look of pity, cast upon him by our Lord, alternately 
maddening and soothing his tempestuous soul. We 



103 



THE PHILO? 3PH5 : I INTEGRATION. 

can see the Saviour of mankind, dragged from one court- 

i ' : of the Palace to another, hailed before Annas and 
Caiaphas and then before the whole Sanhedrim, left 
shivering in the guard-room, surrounded by the ignorant 
~ trials :: :Jie H :: ~r.i: ir_i :r; .t;.-r :iu-.:? ;: :jie 
zr::i\ soliitr? "- : .~7 rt; ~i= sa-rec :i: :_7;::r: by 
cruel hands, and even spat upon Wt see Bis guards 
inventing a coarse game to amuse themsehes. They 
blindfold Him and strike Bun with their hfltigfc, each 
one crying, as he braises the gentle face. M Prophesy : 
us, thou Christ, who is he that smote tnee? ,, sec 

the national crime of a mock trial, before a bitterly 
prejudiced tribunal, and the condemnation of aninno- 
person upon the false testimony of perjured wit- 



The Sanhedrim cf the Jews cannot pronounce the 
death sentence; therefore charges must be brought before 
Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator of Judaea. He 
represents the empire that has given law to the world, 
±1: us 5-rr:l:-i :':-■: "zr.zziz'.ts :: ;_s: ::-ili-i :e:~e-r- 
men and nations; sur rxpect justice at this 

tribunal ! Alas, the position of Roman Governor, like 
many another office of earthly court favor, is not a bed 
of roses. What with the continuous religions dis- 
turbances amongst the farm::::. Jews, -eir constant 
quarrels with the Roman soldiery, their turbulent up- 

rigngs fmm fim y to rirrw> as sntng* iroatnp rpfnrnwHr t - g 

it into his head to pretend that he is their Messiah; 
what with the sharp reprimands that Pilate re c eiv es 
from Rome occasionally, as news of these riotous pro- 
ceedings reaches the capital of the Empire, he scarcely 

IC4 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

feels the independence and freedom that are essential 
to the right administration of justice. He lives in a state 
of nervous apprehension lest some fresh event may in- 
crease his unpopularity with the Jews, and cause him 
to be recalled. 

It is pitiable to see the inward conflict between inclina- 
tion and duty. He tries in every way to soften the blood- 
thirsty priests. He declares that he finds no fault in 
Jesus. Hearing that the accused is from Galilee, he 
grasps at the chance of evading responsibility by sending 
Him to Herod. Failing in this he bethinks Mm of the 
custom of releasing a prisoner at the feast; but they 
choose Barabbas. 

As a last resort he causes Christ to be scourged, 
thinking that this will satisfy them, and that, when they 
have seen Him suffer, they will be ready to let Him go, 
but the smell of blood only makes hounds fiercer; and 
when Pilate, showing Christ crowned with the bloody 
thorns, and standing weak and pale, His lacerated 
shoulders pleading for their pity, cries, "Behold the 
Man!" they only cry the louder, like Devil-possessed 
maniacs, as they were, " Crucify Him, Crucify 
Him! " 

Then, driven to his wit's end, Pilate commits the deed 
that has made his name the by-word of all men: for, 
by the symbolical act of washing his hands, he declares 
himself clear of the whole matter, and yet, at the same 
moment, delivers Jesus over to them to be crucified. He 
is a judge that pronounces the prisoner "not guilty" 
and then proceeds to sentence him for the crime, he has 
just declared, the prisoner did not commit. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

We see the^procession on its way' to Calvary, the 
women who loved Him weeping, the steady march of 
the Roman soldiers, and the staggering steps of Jesus, 
bearing His heavy cross. We see Him sinking beneath 
the load, and the stout country man compelled to take it 
up ; and now we notice the thread-like stream of human 
beings wending its way outside the city walls to the 
Place of the Skull. 

Three crosses he on the ground beside the^sockets, 
that have been dug to hold them, ready to be uplifted 
with their burdens. Our Lord refuses the opiate, that He 
may suffer all the pain that human flesh and human 
nerves can cause in their disintegration. He lies upon 
the pieces of wood; the iron pierces His tender flesh; and 
we hear the thud of a heavy hammer — yet there is no 
moan. 

It is only when the cross is raised aloft with its living 
crest, and thrown into the hole, and the entire weight of 
the tortured body is jerked upon the wounds, and the 
tendons snap, and the nerves like liquid streams of 
fire pour their agonies into the reeling brain, it is only 
in this moment that a sound comes from the quivering 
lips, "Father, forgive them for they know not what 
they do." 

And now we see the soldiers casting lots for His 
raiment, and the chief priests and scribes passing by and 
railing at Him: "If He be Christ," say they, "let Him 
save Himself. Let Him come down from the cross." 
Once more we see the sacred lips move. Even in 
this moment of agony He thinks not of Himself. 
He is comforting the thief on the cross beside Him. 

106 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

I 

"To-day," said He, " shalt thou be^with Me in 
Paradise." 

Looking down at His mother, jwho stood with a 
breaking heart, which responded to every throb of her 
Son's agony, and, thinking of her widowed loneliness, 
He turns His fast-dimming eyes towards John, the 
beloved disciple and says, "Woman behold thy son." 

His agony now draws from Him the despairing words 
of David, which had been used before as prophetic of 
the Messiah's passion: "Eloi! Eloi! lama sabachthanil " 
He thinks that even God has forsaken Him. 

As time goes by, thirst of the most intolerable kind, 
the burning thirst caused by the fever of His wounds 
and the tension of His nerves and muscles, becomes the 
most agonizing of all His sufferings. Whose heart has 
not melted to see the avidity with which a little child, 
flushed with fever, clutches the cooling cup from its 
mother's hand; but what is this beside the pathos of the 
words " I thirst, " as they are wrenched from Jesus by 
His three hours' suffering! What gratitude do we not 
feel toward the one unknown hand that uplifted the 
sponge upon the sprig of hyssop, and held it to His lips ! 

And about the sixth hour darkness came over all the 
earth till the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, 
and the veil of the Temple was rent in twain. 

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice He said, 
"Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit;" and 
having said thus, He gave up the Ghost. 

"And Joseph, a good man and a just, went unto Pilate 
and begged the body of Jesus. And He took it down and 
wrapped it in linen and laid it in a sepulchre that was 

107 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

hewn in stone, wherein never man was laid. The 
women also, which came with Jesus from Galilee, fol- 
lowed after and beheld the sepulchre and how His body 
was laid, and they returned and prepared spices and 
ointments and rested the Sabbath Day according to 
the Commandment.' ' 



108 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF 
THE PLACE OF DEPARTED SPIRITS, AND THE SPIRITUAL 
ENVIRONMENT OF MAN. 

We shall attempt here to prove that one who accepts 
the Scriptures, of the Old and New Testaments, should 
believe in the existence of a spirit-world surrounding 
this earth, and should hold that this living environment 
contains conscious beings, and that it is the abode of 
men and women immediately after they leave this life. 
We shall also try to show that the position of the Church 
on this interesting matter is the goal to which the most 
recent experiments and scientific theories are leading 
advanced thinkers. 

With regard to the teaching of the Old Testament, we 
have a clear example in the opening of the young man's 
eyes by the prayer of Elisha. "And when the servant of 
the man of God was risen early and gone forth, behold 
an host compassed the city, both with horses and chariots, 
and his servant said unto him, 'Alas, my master, how 
shall we do ?' and he answered, 'Fear not, for they that 
be with us are more than they that be with them.' And 
Elisha prayed and said, ' Lord, I pray Thee open his 
eyes, that he may see.' And the Lord opened the eyes 
of the young man, and he saw; and behold, the mountain 
was full of horses and chariots of fire round about 
Elisha." Thus we observe that there existed large 



109 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

numbers of living beings that remained invisible to 
the natural faculties of an ordinary man. All that was 
necessary to perceive them was an addition of subjective 
power. His faculties being too coarse to apprehend 
objects of so fine a fibre; or essence, he needed only an 
exaltation of spiritual vision, a sixth sense, as some have 
called it. We notice this exaltation, to a less degree, in 
poets, and in persons of an originating disposition ; and 
we can easily understand that God, who in this century 
is revealing Himself chiefly by scientific discoveries, in 
other ages may have used the channel of spiritual illumi- 
nation so freely, with prophets and dreamers of dreams, 
as to our rational, and somewhat skeptical temper, would 
seem incredible. Such a theory alone accounts satis- 
factorily for the appearances of angels, and for countless 
instances of what we call supernatural visitations. Of 
course, if one deny the truth of the Bible, other arguments 
must be used. Here we are only trying to show that any- 
one who accepts the Scriptures should believe in the 
existence of a living and conscious environment. It 
does not follow that these spiritual beings are not also 
material. They may be composed of matter in so fine 
a form that it transcends faculties like ours, just as the 
shrill sounds, which become inaudible to our ears, 
nevertheless exist, and can be plainly heard by a tiny 
insect; or smells, which are too delicate to be detected 
by us, are known to exist, because dogs follow them. We 
can imagine a world of sights too brilliant or too dark; 
sounds too shrill or too deep ; smells too delicate or too 
powerful; tastes too sweet or too bitter; touches too hot 
or too cold, too smooth or too rough, too immense or too 



no 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

intense — to come within the range of our faculties; and 
we can picture to ourselves a never-ending succession of 
conscious material creatures to whom these sights, 
sounds, smells, tastes, and touches, would be, in turn, 
perceptible and intelligible. Therefore the inhabitants 
of the so-called spirit world that is around us, may be 
just as decidedly material as ourselves, only finer; nay, 
it is even possible, and to our mind quite probable, that 
we go on from the lower to the higher, from the grosser 
up through these finer stages, as the process of our sanc- 
tification goes on. 

In the New Testament, the teaching is plainer still. 
St. Paul's conversion resulted from a manifestation to 
him of the higher spiritual circles of existence. Writing 
afterwards of his experiences, he says : "I knew a man in 
Christ above fourteen years ago, — whether in the body, I 
cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: 
God knoweth; — such an one caught up to the third 
Heaven. And I knew such a man, — whether in the 
body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; — 
how that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard un- 
speakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to 
utter."— 2 Cor. XII: 2. 

When Jesus was transfigured on the Mount, He was 
seen discoursing with Moses and Elias, who had left this 
life and were living in the Place of Departed Spirits. It is 
much easier to understand that the faculties of Peter, 
James, and John were illuminated to perceive the exist- 
ence of persons whose abode is always about us, but who 
are invisible to our senses, than that these were spirits 
that had come from some distant sphere, merely for the 



in 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

occasion, and that could have been discerned by us 
with our ordinary faculties if we had been present. 

We are not. however, left to draw mere inferences in 
regard to New Testament teaching about the Place of 
Departed Spirits. Christ has given us as plain a picture 
as human beings need, in the parable of the rich man 
and Lazarus and in His statement on the cross to the 
dying thief. 

The rich man died and went to Hades. While there 
he could plainly see Lazarus who was in Paradise. They 
were separated. A great gulf, which neither could pass, 
was between them but they were able to talk to each 
other. The word "Paradise" meant a garden, and 
would be used to denote that portion of the Place of 
Departed Spirits where the inhabitants were happy; 
whereas the other part of the same place contained the 
abode of some who were in torment. The home of the 
departed spirits, therefore, we take to be one place in 
which a gulf, -whether moral or physical, separates the 
blessed from the cursed. 

To the dying thief upon the cross Jesus said, " To-day 
thou shalt be with me in Paradise."' Those who affirm 
that the state of the blessed dead is one of rest, or sleep, 
which will last till the Resurrection, are forced either to 
iimore this appeal to Scripture, or are obliged to resort 
to an extremely far-fetched and unsatisfactory under- 
standing of it. They say that Jesus meant, "I say 
to-day, unto thee, that thou shalt be with me in Para- 
dise." By its meaningless redundancy this expression 
carries its refutation upon its face. It is an exceedingly 
weak attempt to escape from the plain teaching of 
Scripture . 

112 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

It was into this "Place of Departed Spirits" that 
Christ descended. We know that He would keep His 
word with the dying thief, and that, if there are two dis- 
tinct localities in the abode of the spirits, one Paradise 
and the other a place of torment, He would go to Para- 
dise, because He had said He would meet the thief there. 
On the other hand, we are told by St. Peter that He went 
and preached to the ''spirits in prison". These are also 
described as the persons who were disobedient in the 
time of Noah. Hence they would be not in Paradise 
but in the other place. It is possible, since Lazarus 
and Dives could converse across the gulf, that Jesus 
may have preached to the imprisoned spirits from 
Paradise, that is, spoke across the gulf; but we consider 
it more probable that He would have gone to them, 
if He wished to speak to them. 

"Why then," the question arises, "should Jesus 
have desired to preach to the imprisoned spirits ? M 
The only answer we can give is that the abode of the 
wicked may be a place where they are not without 
possibility of elevation, one in which the condition is 
not devoid of hope, and where the dwellers may pro- 
gress in sanctification. If it were otherwise, then our 
Lord's preaching to them would be only to mock them 
in their helpless condition, and to add to their agony 
and their remorse This idea is out of the question; 
and so we must infer that the abode of the unsanctified 
dead is one of progression, and that their suffering is 
purifying in its nature. Anyone that accepts the Scrip- 
tures of the Old and New Testaments, in our opinion 
at least, must hold the following beliefs: 



"3 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(i) That we are surrounded by an environment of 
conscious beings. 

(2) That this is what the Church means by the 
" Place of Departed Spirits". 

(3) That this " Place" is of a double nature; to one 
class of persons it is a place of joy, a spiritual pleasure 
garden, i. e. } Paradise; to a different class it is a world 
ofjtorment. 

(4) That this suffering is for the purpose of cleansing 
from sin those who undergo it; and that the abode of the 
departed is one of progressive sanctification. 

Some however will not accept the ^Scriptures as evi- 
dence in the question, and will desire scientific proofs. 
To these we reply that what little we do know about the 
problem, from observed facts, will go to substantiate 
the position we have just defined. 

Obviously the field of experiment has, up to the 
present, been almost closed to us. No man has returned 
from the "Place of Departed Spirits" to tell us of his 
experiences there, or his inferences from them, except 
the one whose word it is not considered scientific to accept 
namely, Jesus of Nazareth. The experiment, as an ex- 
periment for human instruction, was only made once; 
and it has proved the truth of the experimenter's own 
statement that, unless men will believe Moses and the 
Prophets, they will not believe, even though one actually 
came back to them from the dead. This has proved to 
be the case, although the resurrection of Jesus has been 
declared by competent authority to be the "best au- 
thenticated fact in history." It is true that thousands 
have believed it, but they are those that accept Moses 



114 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and the Prophets. Those that refuse to believe the 
latter are the persons that deny the truth of the Resur- 
rection. 

An experimental test, however, cannot be a satisfac- 
tory one unless it can be frequently repeated. The 
nearest approach to such an experiment consists in the 
taking of ether, or opium, or chloroform, and endeavor- 
ing to recall any recollections of thoughts or feelings that 
we may have had in our unconscious state, this being 
the closest approach to actual death that we can 
achieve with the ability to return to life again. It 
would be interesting, as well as profitable, to collect from 
persons immediately upon their coming out of anaes- 
thesia the impressions of their experiences in the un- 
conscious state. The writer once, when about to take 
ether in a dental chair, determined to remember the last 
thought in his mind previous to unconsciousness, in 
order to ascertain whether it would throw light upon the 
subject of the next life. He can remember thinking, just 
at the last moment, that he was entering another life, 
and also that he would not be able to remember details 
of it, but that, when he returned to consciousness again, 
he would always thereafter be sure, in his own mind, 
that there was an immediate consciousness after death. 
His first thought, as earthly self-recognition returned 
was that of coming back from another conscious exist- 
ence, and not from a blank. This is the experience of 
only one person; and, however satisfactory it may be to 
him, no scientific value, of course, can attach to it. 
Nevertheless, if attempts of this kind were made, care- 
fully recorded, and compared, much useful scientific 
data might be secured. 

"5 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Experiment being almost entirely blocked to us we 
must fall back upon observation. 

First j let us look in upon our own minds; and after- 
wards we may examine external objects. When we 
take an introspective survey, we meet at once the 
phenomenon of double consciousness. In sleep and 
waking we live two distinct lives. Sometimes they run 
into each other, and the experiences of the one infringe 
upon the other; but, in the main, the trains of conscious- 
ness are separate, and each is continuous and coherent in 
its own sphere. In dreams we recognize our own per- 
sonality, sometimes as identical with our waking self, 
but, at other times a« oblivious of it, or as disconnected 
entirely with it. We experience sensations that make a 
powerful impression upon us in our sleeping state, but 
these, when awake, we are utterly unable to recall. In 
vivid dreams the actors appear just as material as 
they appear to us in our ordinary condition. They can 
apparently be seen, heard, touched, and apprehended 
by our senses. They eat, sleep, and act as men ap- 
pear to do when awake. We notice, nevertheless, that 
the ideas of time and space, however clear they may 
seem to be in dreams, are, when we afterwards re- 
flect upon them, exceedingly confused. Places thou- 
sands of miles apart are brought together, and we seem 
to be in both at once. So the past and future are in- 
extricabl) involved in a perpetual present. Persons are 
thought to be with us that have long since died, and 
ethers, not born at the period represented by the dream, 
are, by a sort of anticipation of the future, made to ap- 
pear and take part in it. 

116 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

How do we know that the phantasms of our sleeping 
consciousness have not some conscious realities behind 
them ? Of course there is not the same kind of external 
thing beneath these fancies as there is behind the more 
tangible experiences of our waking life; but what is the 
difference between them ? Wherein, for example, does 
the dream of a tree differ from the waking perception 
of one ? They b >th appear the same. The sense of 
sight gives no difference. Also, if we had dreamed 
that we touched the tree, the feeling would have been 
the same as that which we have when we handle a tree 
when awake. Yet we arc convinced that the tree we see 
in the day-time is something outside ourselves, that it is 
really there; and we believe that the tree of our dreams 
must have been purely imaginary, i. e., that it has 
had no real existence outside of our own minds. If we 
look carefully into the two cases, we will observe that, 
in the instance cf the waking experience, we can verify 
the phantasm of the mind by repeating it; and we come 
to believe that, at a certain spot, there stands something 
that we call a tree, and which has the power of always 
causing in us the same sensations of greenness, rough- 
ness, resinous odoi, or what not. It is this expectation 
of the permanence of the recurrent sensations that 
leads us to believe that there must be, at that place, 
something, we do not know what, but something real, 
which always makes the same impressions upon us; and 
we express this expectation by saying that we consider 
tins a real tree. On the other hand, because we cannot 
expei iment with the tree of our dreams, and cannot be 
sure of the recurrence of the same sensations, and repeat 



117 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

them at will, we say that it has no reality at the back 
of it, that nothing exists there outside of our own minds. 
The man who affirms that the consciousness of dreams 
has no reality outside of the perceiving imagination is 
just as un philosophical as the man who asserts that the 
tree of our waking experience is really, apart from our 
faculties, precisely as we see it to be. It is ignorant 
presumption to assert that, because this object appears 
to us tall and round and green and odorous, it is so in 
itself apart from us, and would be so to beings differ- 
ently constituted. It is equally presumptuous to assert 
that the consciousness of perfect sleep, i. e., the realm 
of dreams unmixed with any thoughts of our waking 
state, may not be a world of real existences, either 
spiritual, or material, or both. 

We observe also a double consciousness in our waking 
state. We give the name of "consciousness" to the 
chain of feelings and thoughts recognized in succes- 
sion by the ego, or brought under the immediate at- 
tention of the mind. We are also possessed of num- 
erous experiences that are, at the same time, unrecog- 
nized by the mind, but are present in what we 
call the realm of subconsciousness. We possess many 
feelings arising from the workings of digestion, and 
other organic functions of the body, but it is only rarely 
that the mind recognizes them, and it is only when 
some derangement occurs that we become aware of their 
existence. The ticking of a clock may fall upon the 
drum of the ear, and proceed from that to the brain by 
the auditory nerve, and yet the mind may not recognize 
it; so that it does not form part of the present conscious- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

ness of the mind. We see, therefore, that the conscious- 
ness of a person, at any given moment, is a sort of pro- 
tuberance of the ego, out of the realm of subconscious- 
ness, into the world of immediate cognition in which we 
live. The mind is like a fountain that draws its sup- 
plies from an unfathomable reservoir of subconscious- 
ness. When we reflect upon the number of our thoughts, 
it seems incredible that there could be stored in our 
brains a separate cell, or material impression, or change, 
for each thought. However minute the impression 
may be, we cannot consider our brains large enough 
to contain such a multitude of distinct impressions. 
Therefore we conclude that we must be surrounded by 
a world of spirit- force, and that our thoughts are really 
stored in this ; and that this realm of other-consciousness 
is the place from which all our recollections are drawn. 
What is more probable than that this is at once the 
place from which our souls have become incarnated, 
and the place to which they will go immediately after 
death, the " Place of Departed Spirits", the world of 
our dreams, and even of our real waking inner self? 
This hypothesis gathers up all the apparently irrecon- 
cilable contradictions of the phenomena of double con- 
sciousness, and makes them intelligible, and, at the same 
time, harmonizes all observed facts with the teaching 
of the Christian Church. While the twenty-second 
Article declares that the Romish teaching regarding 
Purgatory and Pardons is without warrant of Scripture, 
and a "fond thing vainly invented", the Church has 
always believed in an intermediate state, and does not 
deny that this condition may be one of progressive 



119 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

sanctification. According to our hypothesis of the 
gradual triumph of unity throughout the universe, the 
general purpose of this intermediate state would be 
the bringing about of unity throughout the perpetually 
incarnating portions of the spiritual environment of the 
earth, or the gradual sanctification of the human race 
by the influence of the Holy Spirit, making all men one 
in the likeness of God, the Absolutely One, through 
organic unity with Christ in the sacraments, teachings, 
and ordinances of the Christian Church. Making the 
widest conjecture regarding the plan of the universe, we 
assert, according to this theory, that the whole creation 
is being drawn slowly towards Heaven, and that smaller 
spheres are being drawn towards larger, which in their 
turn are being drawn towards their centres; until we 
reach the conception of Heaven, the Absolutely One 
Substance which is the centre of attraction and regula- 
tion for the whole. We observe also the process of 
condensation and unification in all parts of the plan and 
in every direction in which we look, mental, moral, and 
physical; and in every aspect of God, Man, or Nature. 
According to the same hypothesis, we have most prob- 
ably lived on the moon when it was a planet like this, 
have there been condemned to be cast on this earth, and 
are gradually becoming incarnated in it until the elect 
portion of the human race will be one spirit, and the rest 
will be cast upon the sun to undergo a similar process. 
As to how the process of purification by suffering 
takes place in the realm of subconsciousness, or the 
"Place of Departed Spirits, "or whatever we may like 
to call it, we cannot undertake to say, nor does the 
Church define it. 

120 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

It may, however, be by reincarnation. There is one 
incident given in the Scriptures, which, though usually 
overlooked, throws light upon this subject, and that is 
the reincarnation of Elijah in John the Baptist. The 
Old Testament ends with the promise of Elijah's re- 
incarnation, and the New Testament begins with its 
fulfilment in John the Baptist. By reincarnation we 
mean the same soul coming to earth again with a new 
body, and in new surroundings. By the reincarnation of 
Elijah we mean that Elijah came back again to this 
earth and was reborn and became the person whom we 
know as John the Baptist. We do not mean that John 
the Baptist was another man, who had a mind and char- 
acter like those of Elijah, but that John the Baptist 
actually was Elijah. This is a subject of the greatest 
importance, because, if reincarnation occurred once, it 
could occur again. There is much vague and sup- 
erficial theorizing on the subject of reincarnation now- 
adays; but we shall confine ourselves to facts as they 
are set forth in the Holy Scriptures. Joel and Zach- 
ariah had both described a great day of Judgment, 
which was fulfilled when Jerusalem was destroyed by 
the Romans, after the most horrible siege known to 
history. It was the punishment of the Jews for their 
rejection of Christ, the Messiah; but before this day 
should come, according to the prophecy of Malachi, 
Elijah must return and restore all things. 

For hundreds of years before the coming of Christ, 
the expectation of Elijah's return was always associated 
with the appearance of the Messiah. He was to be the 
forerunner of the promised Christ. Let us see how the 



121 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

prophecy was fulfilled. When the Angel announced to 
Zzcharias, in the Temple, that he should have a son 
whose name must be called John, the messenger said : 
'And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the 
Lord their God; and he shall go before Him in the 
spirit and power of Elias — the Greek form of the Hebrew 
Elijah — to turn the hearts of the fathers to the 
children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the 
Just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." 
We see here a iire;: :r:e:r~:e to Malachrs prophecy. 
John :ne Baptist should go before the Mpgaal^ in the 
spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the 
fathers bo the children, and the children to their fathers. 
While all must admit mis much, they may say that it 
does not prove that John the Bap::s: actually was 
Elijah, but merely that he came in the "spirit and 
power" of Elijah. What is meant by the spirit and 
power of a man? I: is true the expression is not free 
from ambiguity. We sp eak of a man having the spirit 
of another when he is actuated by similar motives, and 
has the same disposition; but we should remember jhat 
the Angel is speaking here of the spirit of a manjriiD 
had left this earth and gone to the Place of Departed 
Spirits; so that the word "spirit" would appear, on its 
face to mean the spirit in its literal sense rather than 
one's disposition, or character. We should also re- 
member that he was speaking of a departed spirit whose 
return to earth was as direct a matter of prophecy as 
the coming of Christ Himself. The words of Malachi 
are plain. "Behold I will send unto you — not a man 
like Elijah, or a man having the same spiritual power 



122 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

as Elijah, but, "Elijah, the prophet," the man him- 
self: "Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet, be- 
fore the great and dreadful day of the Lord." Now we 
know that this great day has passed, for the language of 
prophecy shows plainly that it meant the destruction of 
Jerusalem. Therefore, if this was fulfilled before the 
year 70 A. D., Elijah came in the form of some person 
before that time; and if Elijah was reincarnated, before 
the year 70, in whom was he reincarnated if not in John 
the Baptist? Fortunately, however, we have much 
stronger proof. We have our Lord's own statement that 
Elijah was reincarnated in John the Baptist. Nor do 
we depend on one Gospel for our authority, since both 
St. Matthew and St. Mark record it. St. Mark, IX, 
11, 12 and 13, says: And they asked him, saying, 
"Why say the scribes that Elias must first come ?" And 
he answered and told them: Elias verily cometh first 
and restoreth all things, and how it is written of the Son 
of Man, that He must suffer many things and be set at 
nought; but I say unto you that Elias is indeed come, 
and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, 
as it is written of him." If we had no other authority 
than this, strong as it is, some might have said that he 
did not refer to John the Baptist ; but St. Matthew leaves 
no doubt on that point. He says, XVII: 12 and 
13: "But I say unto you that Elias is come already, 
and they knew him not, but have done unto him what- 
soever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man 
suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that 
he spake unto them of John the Baptist". After such 
a statement from our Lord's own lips, it appears 



123 



THE PHI '-" '7 INTEGRATION. 

d::idrily ~:r.r _ : d :'.::: in: J:ir. iie Biiis: i:: -il- 
ly ".is Eli; ill. 

7: ~:s: ;e:yle idle smnze — inner in 

nrrpie: :: G: . - ~ :::: ~ ::dd seen n ::r_- 

r " s: lie y : .--.. i:n, ex:ep: in lie 

rise :: re:ile ~i: ~"r;e taken m in:: :ie He: tii is 



lather than for it. 

might be probable that dd return again, but 

it is not probable that they would return after death." 
This has some weight and it would have more but 
for one significant fact, namely, that Elijah did not 
come back to earth with the same body that went up 
inthe chariot. John was born of his mother Elizabeth, 
and became a little child like any other. If John the 
Baptist had suddenly appeared from the wilderness 
full grown,*and we had no account of his birth ; if, in 
short, Elijah had simply come back with the same body 
which he took with him 866 years before, then we might 
:idnk :ii: lids rein :ini:i:~ ~is deie::der.: ur:n ids 
having left the earth alive. But Elijah left his old body 
behind him in the Place of Departed Spirits, or wher- 
ever it went in the fiery chariot; and, when his spirit 
came back to earth again, it incarnated itself in the 
same way as any other soul takes possession of a human 
body. 

Tie :::: :ii: :ids is :ie :nly ::se :: :ie iind :n :e:::d 
does not detract from its inferential value. The gener- 

s :u::e is :lea: is 



111 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

most of our accepted inferences, but if a man could 
produce one white crow it would overthrow it. You 
might find 50,000 black crows; but if I could show one 
white one, it would disprove the statement that all crows 
are black. 

So if any one argues, because millions of people leave 
this earth, and, so far as we know, never come back 
to it, that therefore reincarnation is impossible, and I 
produce from Scripture one case of a man who did come 
back and was reincarnated, it overthrows his generali- 
zation, provided he agrees to abide by Scripture 
proof. 

Further, if we compare the character of John the 
Baptist with that of Elijah, it will be seen how mar- 
vellously our Lord's statement is corroborated. John 
the Baptist was the exact counterpart of Elijah in all 
his physical, mental, and moral characteristics. Elijah 
the Tishbite came from the wilds of Gilead. The 
inhabitants of that region were regarded by the people 
of Jerusalem much as the natives of the South Sea 
Islands are regarded by the people of London or 
New York. John came from the wilderness with the 
same half-savage appearance and manner of speech as 
Elijah. The raiment of camel's hair, the sheepskin 
mantle, the locusts and wild honey, the fierce gestures, 
and ringing denunciations of sin are all repetitions of 
the Tishbite. 

Compare Elijah's bold rebuking of Ahab and Jezebel 
with John's reproach of Herod and Herodias. It is 
the same man, speaking in the same strain, after an ab- 
sence of over 800 years. You find the similarity of 



"5 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

disposition, even in the little details of character. For 
example, take their fits of despondency. Compare the 
wail of Elijah in the cave with that of John in the tower 
of Machaerus. Elijah says: "The children of Israel 
have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, 
and slain thy prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, 
am left, and they seek my life, to take it away." He 
speaks as if he had not a friend left in the world, and 
his life had been a failure. How like John the Baptist, 
broken down by his ill-treatment, utterly despondent, 
even distrusting the Saviour whom he had only a short 
time before proclaimed as the Lamb of God, sending to 
ask of Jesus, "Art thou He that should come, or do we 
look for another?" 

We find also a striking resemblance between Herod 
and Ahab. Their characters were certainly similar. 
There was the same fondness for grandeur. Both were 
restorers of cities and builders of magnificent palaces. 
Both were guilty of gross licentiousness. Both were 
superstitious, and cowardly. Ahab feared Elijah, and 
Herod feared John; but neither was man enough to 
obey the prophet and do the right. 

Likewise do we find a strange parallel in the charac- 
ters of Jezebel and Herodias. There is the same super- 
stition, debauchery, and vindictiveness in each, so that 
it is a question which name of the two is the more in- 
famous to our ears. 

We do not presume to say that Herod was a reincarna- 
tion of Ahab, or Herodias an incarnation of Jezebel; but 
we do say positively, because Our Lord Himself says so, 
that John the BaDtist was a reincarnation of Elijah; 

126 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and we point out these other facts as a most singular 
coincidence in connection with it. 

We express our conclusions in the following proposi- 
tions : 

(i) We are surrounded by a world of spirit-life. 

(2) This is the world which we mean by the realm 
of subconsciousness. 

(3) It is the world of our dreams. 

(4) It is the place where all our thoughts are stored. 

(5) It is the place from which we came at birth, and 
to which we go immediately after we leave this life. 

(6) It is the "Place of Departed Spirits" into which 
Christ went. 

(7) It is Paradise to some, and torment to others. 

(8) It is from this world that many intuitive ideas, 
fleeting recollections of a previous life, presentiments 
of the future, and instinctive motives emerge. 

(9) It is from thence that many internal suggestions 
come. 

(10) It is a state of perpetual progress towards unity. 

(11) This progress may be accomplished by Reincar- 
nation. 

(12) It will last till the Day of the General Resurrec- 
tion. 



127 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY OF 
THE RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION OF CHRIST. 

As to the historical facts that a person named Jesus, 
of Nazareth, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that 
his followers asserted that their master rose again from 
the dead in accordance with a promise He had made 
to them some time before, there does not appear to be 
much questioning. Some of those who doubt the truth 
of the Scripture narrative take the position that He was 
not really dead. They may urge several arguments in 
support of this view. The events happened a long time 
ago, when people were more credulous and easily de- 
ceived. The burial was not a covering with earth, 
which would have ensured suffocation, if the person had 
been simulating death, but merely the placing in a cave, 
and that at the hands of friends. It is not impossible 
that the Centurion, who had charge of the execution, 
may have been the same whose son Jesus had cured, 
and that he out of gratitude contrived His escape. By 
appearing to wound Him in the side, he might prevent 
the others from breaking His legs, as those of the two 
thieves were broken. It may also be not unreasonably 
suggested that Pilate, whose wife, we know, was favor- 
able to our Lord, may have been a party to the plan, and 
thereby eased his conscience, and at the same time 
pleased the Jews. The following considerations 

128 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

should satisfy us of the improbability of these 
explanations : 

(i) We must remember that the vengeful Jews were 
present, at the foot of the cross, watching every move- 
ment of the Roman executioners, and gloating over the 
tortures of their Victim. It is incredible that, having 
pursued Him thus far, they would leave Him until per- 
fectly convinced of His death. 

(2) Our Lord had clearly foreseen and accurately 
described His crucifixion, as far back as His conversation 
with Nicodemus, when He compared Himself to the 
serpent impaled by Moses and raised aloft to heal the 
bitten Israelites. It is in the highest degree improbable 
that such a plan for connivance could then have existed. 

(3) There is to be considered the awful risk to one 
undertaking a mock crucifixion, even though assured 
of the connivance of the Centurion, or, perhaps, of the 
Roman Governor himself. The cruel scourging, and 
the crown of thorns are not favorable to this hypothesis. 
The nail wounds in hands and feet are against it. If 
the Centurion had really desired to save our Lord's life, 
he might have bound him to the cross with cords, which, 
as tradition says, he did in the case of the thieves. 

(4) This hypothesis implies that Our Lord foresaw 
the decision at which the Sanhedrim should arrive. 
Though it may have been a foregone conclusion from 
the hate which they bore Him, yet no merely human 
being could foresee with absolute accuracy the decisions 
which would be reached by a deliberative body com- 
posed of the chief men of the nation. Amongst them 
were some favorable to Him, and their influence might 



129 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

have changed the verdict. Even if He had been assured 
beforehand of Pilate's intention to befriend Him, there 
was a third person, Herod, in whose power His life was 
placed. Some other form of execution might have been 
adopted. Stoning, or some death other than crucifixion, 
might have been decided on. To admit that He knew 
beforehand how all of these uncertainties would event- 
uate, with such definiteness that He could promise 
His Disciples to rise again after His crucifixion, would 
be to admit His Supernatural Power. 

(5) The principle objection to the position appears to 
be its utter lack of harmony with the whole life and 
character of our Saviour. It implies that He was a 
deliberate deceiver. Even the bitterest opponent of 
Christianity must hesitate before breathing such a 
suspicion against the Sublime Man of Sorrows. 

Another ground, which may be taken by the unbeliever, 
is that He was really dead, but that He did not rise; 
that His body was stolen by His disciples, who fabricated 
the stories of His reappearance. This was the excuse 
given the Roman soldiers at the suggestion, we are told, 
of the chief priests, when it was discovered that the 
tomb was empty. We know that this was the accepted 
theory amongst the Jews and other enemies of Christ 
down to the time when St. Matthew wrote his Gospel. 
This appears to be the strongest position that an un- 
believer can take. It is, of course, possible that the 
body may have been stolen while the guards were asleep, 
or even by their connivance. The following considera- 
tions, however, should, in our estimation, satisfy un- 
prejudiced minds that there is no truth in this position: 



130 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(i) It has been declared a moral impossibility that 
the Apostles could act so wicked, and deceitful, a part. 
While it may not have been impossible, all fair-minded 
persons will admit that it is in the highest degree im- 
probable. Individuals, of lofty personal character may 
be found in history, who have yielded, under the stress 
of circumstances, to meanness and deceit ; but it is highly 
incredible that, without an adequate motive, such a 
part could have been played by a body of men who after- 
wards showed themselves clear-headed thinkers and 
organizers, and exhibited the most heroic endurance and 
the noblest self-sacrifice. 

(2) We should expect serious discrepancies in the 
various accounts of our Lord's reappearances, upon the 
supposition that they were fabricated. None occurs. We 
should also expect in the chroniclers some air of self- 
consciousness and undue emphasis, of which not a trace 
can be found. Speaking of this, Canon Westcott says 
in his " Gospel of the Resurrection" : " The evangelists 
treat the Resurrection as simply, unaffectedly, inartifi- 
cially, as everything else which they touch. The mir- 
acle seems to them to form a natural part of the 
Lord's history. They show no consciousness that it 
needs greater, or fuller, authentication than the other 
events of His life. A knowledge of the chief events in 
the Lord's ministry, including the Resurrection, and a 
general conviction of their reality and significance, 
is everywhere assumed in the Apostolic writings." 

(3) If we regard this as a conspiracy to deceive, the 
comparatively large number of persons engaged in it 
would render it improbable that the secret could have 



131 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

beerTfaithfully kept. Our Lord showed Himself alive 
to over five hundred persons at different times, and 
in different places, after He had been crucified -^and 
buried. St. Paul tells us that the majority of these were 
still alive when he wrote his first epistle to the Corin- 
thians. The claim was made openly, and was not de- 
nied by any of these. It is indeed hard to^believe 
that a fraud of this kind could have been successfully 
maintained under these circumstances. 

(4) The sudden change that came over the Apostles 
requires an extraordinary event, such as the Resurrection, 
to account for it. ^They sprang from timidity to bold- 
ness, from dejection to joy; and nothing^affords a satis- 
factory reason for this, but the stimulus_of such a mir- 
acle. 

(5) Fanatics, carried away by false beliefs, which 
seem true to them, may be willing to die in their defense; 
but it is improbable that a number of clear-headed men 
would bear the severest persecutions with patience, 
suffer torture, and die cheerfully, praying that their 
enemies might be forgiven ; all for a He which they them- 
selves had originated and knew to be false. Especially 
does this appear true when we consider that they had 
nothing to gain by persisting in such an incredible 
story, which appealed to no class, sect, or nation, and 
which brought upon them the ridicule of both ignorant 
slaves and learned Greeks. 

(6) The narratives that describe our Lord's appear- 
ance after His resurrection bear truthfulness on their 
face. What could be more simple and natural than the 
story of Man 7 Magdalene; of her coming to her Master's 



132 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION, 

tomb, mistaking Him for the gardener, and of His loving 
but dignified revelation of Himself? Blunt, in his 
valuable work on the undesigned co-incidences in the 
Bible, points out the harmony of the Scripture narrative 
concerning Peter and John, and the manner in which 
they approached the tomb with the character and age 
of each. John, being the younger and more active, 
reached the tomb first; but Peter, with characteristic 
boldness, was the first to enter. If internal evidence, 
vivid realism, and fidelity to details, have any value, 
then, assuredly, is this story no fabrication. If such a 
thing had happened, what would have been more 
probable, antecedently, than that, when He showed Him- 
self to the eleven some would have doubted as Thomas 
did; and what reply would be more probable, antece- 
dently, than that our Lord would show His lacerated 
hands and feet, thereby convincing them not only of His 
continued identity, but that His body was the same that 
He wore before His death. The story of His appear- 
ance on the way to Emmaus is stamped with truth in 
every detail; and His departure into Galilee was also 
highly probable antecedently. 

(7) The objection is raised that, in each case our 
Lord revealed Himself only to His friends whose 
testimony should not have the same value as that of 
independent witnesses. Canon Westcott aptly replies 
that Saul, on his way to Damascus, was an enemy when 
our Lord revealed Himself to him. 

(8) There is no force in the suggestion that the 
Apostles may have been deceived by some one who per- 
sonated the Saviour, since our Lord revealed H mself 



133 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

at different times, and in different places, and to such a 
large number of people, even eating with them to con- 
vince them of His reality. 

(9) If the ground be shifted by the Higher Critics 
to the question of the authenticity, or genuineness of 
the Gospel narrative. Canon West s: "No one 

doubts that the Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, 
and Romans were composed by St. Paul and addressed 
to the churches whose name they bear. Nor is there 
much uncertainty as to the date at which they were 
written. The most extreme opinions fix them between 
A. D. 52 and A. D. 59, that is, under no circumstances 
more than thirty years after our Lord's ieath. In each 
of these epistles the literal fact of the Resurrection is 
the implied, or acknowledged, groundwork of the 
Apostles' teaching. Writing to the Corinthians, St. Paul 
says : 

"I delivered unto you first of all that which also I 
received, how that Christ died for our sins according 
to the Scriptures; and that He was buried; and that He 
hath been raised on the third day, according to the 
Scriptures; and that He appeared to Cephas; then to 
the twelve; then He appeared to above five hundred 
brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until 
now, but some are fallen asleep; then He appeared to 
James; then to all the Apostles. And. las: of all, as unto 
one born out of due time, He appeared to me also — 
Whether, then, it be I or they, so we preach, and so ye 
believed.' 1 Apart there:::; from the gospel narratives, 
or from any source which has e'er been questioned, 
we find in these words, admitted by all critics to be 



■34 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

genuine and authentic, a clear statement of at least 
six different occasions upon which our Lord showed 
Himself to competent witnesses after He had been pub- 
licly put to death. Canon Westcott certainly makes a 
reasonable statement when he says: " Indeed, taking all 
the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there 
is no single historic incident better or more variously 
supported than the Resurrection of Christ." To all un- 
biassed readers of history Dr. Arnold's dictum on this 
subject will have serious weight: "I have been used for 
many years," he says, "to study the history of other 
times, and to examine and weigh the evidences of those 
who have written about them; and I know of no one 
fact in the history of mankind which is proved by 
better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the mind of a 
fair inquirer, than that Christ died and rose again from 
the dead." 

The following inferences occur to us as antecedently 
probable, according to our theory, of the triumph of 
unity or condensation: 

(i) If God has, so to speak, distributed Himself by 
a voluntary admixture of Himself with non-being, and 
if He continually draws together atoms and molecules, 
holding them in an organism which Satan is always 
destroying, we should expect Him to incarnate each 
finite portion of Himself, over and over again, in new 
resurrections, as the process of condensation continues. 
Each act of disintegration is the death of a molecule 
or of a body. Each act of unification; whether it be of 
chemical affinity, molecular cohesion, or gravitation, 
or in a higher sphere, of beauty, goodness, or truth, 
is a resurrection. 

r 35 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(2) In the breaking of muscular tissue by exercise, 

in the movement of nerve force by thought, in the 
sloughing of scales from the epidermis we see that 
thousands of deaths take place daily in our living 
bodies. In the renewed strength and growth of muscle, 
the repair of brain waste,, the healing of wounds we see 
thousands of resurrections. It is a fair inference that 
what we see daily occurring in the minute organisms 
that form a human body should occur in the body 
as a whole. We see death followed by resurrection 
continuously in the case of all the lower collections of 
units, and we naturally expect the same in the higher. 

(3) We should expect a priori) the highest organ- 
ism we know, namely the human race as a whole, after 
it has played its pan on this planet, to emerge into 
a higher life and renewed activity, as we see in the case 
of the inferior organisms. 

(4) If we believe that the soul that incarnated itself 
in the man Chris: Jesus came directly from the centre 
of the universe to this earth, and gathered together 
certain elements of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and what 
not in the form of what we call a human body, to be 
both God and man, and to lift mankind up to His 
stature, we should expect that this Divine-Human or- 
ganism, in order to be a perfect representation of the 
race organism, and to adequately typefy its future, 
would allow itself to be temporarily dissolved and 

rrected. 

(5) As He is an ideal representative of the race, and 
the first fruits of that higher form which the race 
organism shall take after it has lived its life here, we 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

should expect the mode of our Lord's resurrection, in all 
its details, to afford as perfect a picture, of our next 
union of body and soul as God wishes us to have here. 

(6) Viewing the question from an h priori standpoint, 
it would be as easy for a soul to take unto itself an adult 
body which it had recently discarded, as to take upon 
itself an infant body at birth; and an ordinary birth is 
antecedently a greater miracle than that the soul of 
our Lord should leave his body on the cross, and, after 
spending seventy-two hours in Paradise and the Place 
of Departed Spirits, should return to the body lying in 
the tomb, command its atoms to resume their former 
occupations, and once more make the body rise and 
obey it. 

(7) We should expect the resurrected body to be the 
same'in "appearance as'it was before'death; for, since it 
is a type of the bodies\t the general resurrection, it is 
in^accordance with our"ideas*of God's'justice' that the 
faces and forms we have learned to love here will be per- 
petuated beyond. 

""*(8) We should also expect that while the body would 
present indisputable marks of its continued identity, it 
would also evince new qualities and higher powers in its 
glorified state. 

(9) The description of our Lord's body after it had 
come forth from the tomb accords with our h priori ex- 
pectations. Its continued identity is clearly proved by 
the fact that the disciples recognized Him and by the 
wounds which He showed. On the other hand, Mary 
Magdalene and the two disciples on the way to Emmaus 
did not recognize Him immediately; and the description 



137 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

of His appearance is very like that of His transfiguration; 
and that His resurrected body had new powers we find 
attested by His passing through closed doors. 

The ascension of our Lord, both as to its antecedent 
probability and as to the actual manner of its occur- 
rence, is singularly corroborative of our theory. 

(i) The ancient Egyptians, and other Oriental nations, 
regarded the stars and other heavenly bodies as having 
a definite and close relationship to the earth, and a direct 
influence upon the destinies of its inhabitants. It was 
a natural, and certainly not unreasonable, expectation. 

(2) On the earth we see that the tiniest organism 
has a fixed relationship to other similar organisms and, 
with them, forms a higher organism; which in its turn, 
together with others, forms one still higher. For ex- 
ample : The heart of a man, though an organism in it- 
self, is made up of thousands of smaller organisms; 
and the heart, brain, lungs, and other organs, to- 
gether form the organism which we call the body ; and 
this body, and others together form the state and the 
race. Following out the same process, it is not un- 
reasonable to expect that the universe, as a whole, may 
be an organism with all its parts dynamically and sub- 
consciously related to each other. 

(3) The distance which separates the heavenly bodies 
does not militate against this supposition. A thing 
which seems to us to be a solid and unbroken unit is in 
reality composed of thousands of smaller organisms, each 
separate from the others by what may be for it a con- 
siderable distance. To God, Who looks at them from 
Heaven, the planets may appear as close together as the 

1*8 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

orpusclcs in our blood appear to us to be; and the 
material universe, as a whole, may appear as compact 
to God as my human body appears to me. 

(4) The human mind instinctively inclines to the 
belief that our earth has its part to play in the whole 
scheme, and that some day we shall know fully what 
that part is. 

(5) The fact that from his birth man grows in knowl- 
edge, combined with the fact that the human race as a 
whole has been similarly growing from its beginning, 
leads naturally to the inference that this process of 
growth in knowledge will continue until the human race 
knows all that is to be known upon this earth, and, that, 
in order that the growth may still continue, it must 
remove to a higher sphere. 

(6) A belief in the benevolence of the Creator 
strengthens this view, because it is unlikely that such a 
Being would implant in us curiosities, desires, and long- 
ings that He never meant to satisfy. 

(7) We should expect therefore that, sometime during 
the history of life on this planet, communication would 
be opened up between it and some of the other spheres 
with which it is connected in the great scheme; and, if 
there is one central sphere from which the motions of 
all are governed, we should expect to hear from this 
first. 

(8) What is the story of the incarnation, death, 
resurrection, and ascension of our blessed Lord, but the 
story of a flying visit made to this planet by a resident 
of another? It exactly fulfils our expectations of such 
a visit. It explains thepast history of man and his 



139 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

future destiny. It has given an ideal to which the whole 
race can work up, and, at the same time, it has provided 
the organized mechanism of the Church to bring about 
this final elevation. 

(9) Before his ascension our Lord expressly declared 
to His followers that in His father's home were many 
mansions and that, upon His return there, He would 
make preparations for the reception of some of this 
earth's inhabitants. 

(10) We have seen that what we call the law of gravi- 
tation is merely a human view of a universal mode of 
God's working, whereby He holds bodies together in a 
large organism, just as He holds molecules together in a 
small one, or atoms in a molecule. We have seen that 
our Lord had control of atomic affinities, when He 
changed the water into wine; of the affinities of mole- 
cules, when He passed through closed doors; and we 
would naturally expect some evidence of control of the 
attractions and affinities that larger bodies have for 
each other. The law that bound Him to the earth 
was nothing more or less than the direct exercise of the 
will-power of God, partly inherent in the material 
fragments of His being, partially resident in our Lord's 
spiritual environment which we call the world of sub- 
consciousness, but chiefly transmitted to Him directly 
from the central sphere. The divine power and self- 
consciousness into which He had by this time grown 
would probably ensure His ability to suspend the law 
of gravitation without "a special eflux of power trans- 
mitted from the central sphere; yet such the Father may 
have given Him. 



140 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(n) We believe that our Lord not only ascended 
bodily to Heaven but also that He remains there, seated 
at the right hand of God on high. 

St. Stephen in the act of dying and St. John on the 
isle of Patmos saw their risen Lord by a special illumi- 
nation, and recognized Him in this position. It may be 
stated that such a grossly anthropomorphic conception 
of God cannot be a philosophical one. We reply that 
it is reasonable and intelligible. Stephen looked up 
into Heaven and saw something that was really there, 
and had as much power to convince him of its reality as 
the living human form of Jesus had when it was on 
the earth. It is just as philosophical to say that our 
Lord is actually sitting with His human body, which 
we would recognize as His, if we were there, at the right 
hand of the Father on an actual material throne, and 
that the Father, the Son, the throne, and the assembled 
saints are really there, as it is for me to say that 
the stones and trees and houses that I see on the 
earth are really here. The stones and trees I see 
look differently to me when I inspect them through a 
microscope, and I cannot tell what they would appear 
to beings constituted differently from myself. What 
they are in themselves I cannot tell; but as they 
always appear to me to possess the groups of qualities 
that I designate stone and trees, I describe these per- 
sistent occurrences by saying that the stones and trees 
are real objects. As God is in Heaven He may be 
without body, parts, or passions; and yet He may take 
to Himself shapes and appearances, for faculties like 
St. Stephen's, which would be as real as the stones and 



141 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

trees are to me. What we mean when we say we believe 
that our Lord is seated on the right hand of God is that, 
if we had faculties of perception exactly like those of 
the dying St. Stephen, and if we, with those faculties, 
looked upward, we should at this very moment see the 
same throne, and the same Lord Jesus Christ that he 
saw. Yet, at the same time, we may believe that what 
is really there, in the strict metaphysical sense of 
reality, is absolute Unity. 

We also believe that when the evolution of man has 
been completed upon the earth, and all the individual 
members of Christ have grown into complete unity, the 
Bridegroom will come to the earth and receive unto 
Himself the Bride, which is His wider Body, perfected 
and sanctified by the operation of the Holy Ghost; and 
:he new Adam shall live upon the earth during the mil- 
lenial period. This implies a discrimination or a 
judgment between the individual members of the new 
Adam and the individual members of the old, the latter 
of whom must be cast upon a new planet not sufficiently 
cooled to be described as anything but a lake of fire; 
and as our sun will, by that time, have probably cooled 
down into a planet, everything points to the conclusion 
that the Sun will be the abode of the finally impenitent 
\ nd the unbaptized. 



142 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY 
OF THE PHENOMENA OF PENTECOST AND THE WORK 
OF THE HOLY GHOST. 

The Holy Ghost appears to be the whole spirit of 
God manifesting Himself locally at specific times. 
Space and time are necessary conditions of sensuous per- 
ception, or of any intelligible notion whatever. While 
spirit, as it is in reality, may not be limited by time and 
space, it must- be so to be recognized by us. For God, 
as He is in Himself, there may be no past or future but 
only a never-ending present; but, as He makes Himself 
known to us, there is a regular sequence in His actions 
that take place at different times and in different 
localities. We naturally regard our souls as having a 
local connection with our human bodies, and usually be- 
lieve that this local connection has a beginning in time, 
i. e., that it commences with our birth. It is plain that 
such a connection is a natural one to assume for the 
sake of intelligibility. The Holy Spirit of God may 
have no local habitation, or no beginning or ending; but, 
for the sake of bringing Himself within the grasp of a 
human understanding, He may manifest Himself locally 
upon this earth, and more particularly at one time than 
another. 

Our first mention of the Spirit occurs in Genesis I: 2, 
"And the earth was withoutform and void; and darkness 



143 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

was upon the face of the deep; and the'Spiritof God 
moved upon the face of the waters.'" j In the eleventh 
verse of the fifty-first Psalrn. David said, "Take not 
Thy Holy Spirit from me. ,; He was conscious of re- 
ceiving guidance and comfortfrom the "Spirit of God"; 
and that this Spirit is identical with the Holy Ghost our 
Lord Himself implies when He says in the thirty-sixth 
verse of the twelfth chapter of Mark: " For David him- 
self said, by the Holy Ghost, The Lord said to my 
Lord, Sit Thou on my right hand, till I make thine en- 
emies thy footstool." The work of redemption was 
accomplished with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, 
inasmuch as it was He that conceived the human body 
of the Redeemer, nourished it, descended upon it at 
His baptism, and gradually hlled it with all the fulness 
of the Godhead. Elizabeth and Zacharias were both 
rilled with the Holy Ghost. Notwithstanding all this, 
we read in the seventh chapter. thim*-ninth verse, of 
St. John's Gospel: "But this spake He of the Spirit 
tfhich they that believe on Him should receive: for the 
Holy Ghost was not yet given because that Jesus was 
not yet glorified." In the fourteenth chapter and six- 
teenth verse of St. John's Gospel he says: "I will pray 
the Father and He shall give you another Comforter 
that He may abide with you forever." 

From these records it is plain that, though the Spirit of 
God did manifest Himself at different places in the 
history of the world prior to the day of Pentecost, He 
did not, until that time, manifest Himself as the Holy 
Ghost with this peculiar work to do which we find Him 
fulfilling in the subsequent history of the human race. 



X44 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

The personality of the Holy Ghost may be impressed 
upon us by a brief general consideration of the subject 
of ghosts. We believe that our life comes from God, 
and that our souls are little sparks of His divinity; yet 
we believe that each has a personality distinct also from 
that of God. My personality is composed of all my 
experiences, from infancy to death, linked together by 
self-consciousness and the recognition of my own 
identity amidst the changing environments of my life- 
time. After I am dead, this total personality, or group 
of experiences, co-ordinated in space and sequential in 
time, may continue to exist independently of the material 
fabric of my body. This continued personality I call 
my ghost. It is myself, my ego, transported to a new 
sphere. It retains all my recollections and affections; 
all the moral and intellectual characteristics of my 
earthly self belong to it. It may be divorced from 
matter altogether, or it may gather around itself, accord- 
ing to the popular idea of a ghost, a body of so fine a 
texture as to be generally invisible to us. 

The soul of our Lord Jesus Christ ascended with His 
body to the central sphere of the universe ; and the Holy 
Ghost, with a new work before Him, having received 
"good gifts for men", descended upon the Apostles 
assembled in the upper room. Just as the soul of our 
Lord on the earth gathered and held together a multitude 
of atoms in one body, so the Holy Ghost came to earth 
to gather and hold together a multitude of complex 
organisms, namely human beings, in one body. 

Singular phenomena accompanied the gift of the Holy 
Ghost at Pentecost: " And suddenly there came a sound 



*45 1 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

from heaven ..5 :: a rushing mighl and il : : 

all the house where they were sitting; and there ap- 
peared unto them cloven tongues like as of 6re and it sat 
upon each of them; and they ere all filled with the 
Holy Ghost, and began to speak with Jther tongues as 
the Spirit gave them utterance." — Acts II: 2. ;. and 4. 
The cloven tongues :: hre were apparently a mani- 
:es:ation of electricity; end the laying on of hands, by 
which the Holy Ghost was communicated, indicates 
that the laws of magnetism and electric phenomena 
were, and are, used in His :;era:i:ns upon man. 

We would not attempt to explain the work of the 
Holy Ga:s: by sc emulations on electricity, but rather 
Id explain electric unifying force and magnetism 
as autward and visible signs :: an inward and 
spiritual grace, conveyed by the Holy Gh:s: upon 
men. 

Things ire what they are by virtue ■:: the peculiar 
ahnn::ies :: their atoms or molecules, and :hese affinities 
depend upon a power transmitted from Heaven. 
This transmission :: power from Gcd to :he objects 
:: the universe appeals to be brought about by His im- 
parting a spiral impulse t: a::nts :r molecules, from 
left to right. :r tram right tc left. The phenomena of 
electricity are nothing mere n;r less than the mani- 
festa:i:ns z: the work :: :he Spirit of God. whirling and 
rotating ill parts :f the universe, whether they be mighty 
planets :r tiny molecules :: hydrogen. A human body 
is an accumulation cf irdmute molecules in countless 
number, each of which is whirled about in a particular 
manner, and for a particular purpose by the Spirit of 

146 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

God. When the Holy Ghost descended upon the 
human bodies of the apostles, on the day of Pentecost, 
there was introduced a new process of atomic or mole- 
cular whirling, by the same spiritual power but with a 
new purpose. By this change in the vibratory or rotary 
motion of their atoms or molecules, the bodies of the 
Apostles were possessed of a new magnetic potency, 
capable of being transmitted by personal contact to 
other men, and especially by the act of laying the hands 
of the transmitter upon the h.ad of the recipient. 
Before Pentecost the Spiritof God moved all the material 
atoms of the universe, including the atoms of every 
man's body; but upon that day as afterwards, proceed- 
ing not only from the Father but also through and from 
the personality of the Man- God, Jesus of Nazareth, 
He imparted to the atoms of the human frame a new life 
and new affinities. We must discriminate between the 
Spirit of God in His general work throughout the 
universe and the same Spirit with a definite work, 
possibly limited to this planet. 

When the Holy Ghost descended upon the early 
Christians, there was a great enlargement of their men- 
tal, moral, and spiritual faculties. These added powers 
were called the "gift " or "gifts" of the Holy Ghost; and 
such texts as St. Paul's admonition to Timothy, to stir 
up the gift which was in him by the laying on of St. 
Paul's hands, prove beyond all doubt that these gifts 
were transmitted by manual contact. In Isaiah XI. 2, 
we learn that these gifts are : Wisdom, Understanding, 
Counsel, Ghostly Strength, Knowledge, True Godliness, 
and Holy Fear. 



147 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

No one would claim thai these tuilities^did not show 
themselves in mankind prior to tie day of Pea 
but what we must claim is that, from that time onward, 
they were imparted not only with greater pc : also 

with a new and derinite significance :t before 

that time. 

The wisdom imparted by the Hcly Ghost enables a 
person to estimaf ::iy the relative values of the 

things belonging to this planet and of those appertain- 
ing:: the whole universe, things Temporal as comp: 
with things eternal It iirects us :: ::nsider our last 
end, which is God, and to order our lives to the attain- 
ment of it. It is not claimed that there was no wisdom of 
this kind prior to Pe:::e::s:. Abraham, M: ses. David, 
and others :: the Old Tes:am 
filled by die Holy Ghost, with a wisdom ~hich enabled 

a :: perceive the vanity :: earthly things is : 
pared with the universal and final A: Pentecost, how- 
ever, the Holy Ghcst began to flluminate men with a 
vivid ^ensr :: the eternal in the temporal, of the lic- 
ence of God on the earth, v: I :f His plan to perfect 
men through Christ 

By the gift :: understanding the Holy Ghost gradually 
imparts a clearer apprehension of the mysteries :f the 
truth. Before Pentecost, men who were led 's/ y.e 
Spirit, especially Isaiah had profound c Mice] tints jfihe 
nature cf God and of the mysteries of His universe ; 
with the descent of the Holy Ghcst ut , : .::s:ir; 

came a new revelation if these mysteries. Tint man, by 
reason :: sir. h^d fallen away from obedience to the 
Divine will and was refusing to play the pan G t: wished 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

him to play in the general scheme, and that, to overcome 
this alienation and to bring man once more in harmony 
with the universe, God had made Himself manifest in 
human flesh, and that this incarnation would continue 
in His Church, through the sacraments, until mankind 
should be restored, these and other kindred revelations 
were imparted by the Holy Ghost with a new and 
startling power, and, from that day imtil the present, 
men have been gradually gaining in their ability to 
appreciate ani understand them. 

By Counsel He influences the Conscience to approve, 
and the will to choose, those things that make for in- 
tegration. We cannot doubt that the Holy Ghost in- 
fluenced the consciences of the Old Testament saints, 
and enabled them to make a proper choice in matters of 
right ani wrong. Yet we see, carried into practice by 
the early Christians, a new code of ethics, given in the 
Sermon on the Mount. The bitter prejudices, the 
pride, cruelty, and lust rampant everywhere were op- 
posed by the generosity, humility, brotherliness, and 
purity of those in whom the new Spirit had begun to 
work. Men had been guided by the Spirit of Goodness 
before. Now they were filled with the Spirit of a Divine 
Being who, entering into their very personality, made of 
them new creatures in Christ. 

The Ghostly Strength, which He imparts, is different 
in kind as well as degree from the kind of help given by 
the Spirit of God to men previous to Pentecost. Then 
it was God, shining through the conscience, but as 
through a glass darkly. Now there is the full light of 
God, completely revealed in the Person of Our Lord 

*49 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Jesus Christ. Then the Spirit outside of man helped 
him. Now the Holy Ghost enters into a man and be- 
comes part of him, so that the strength of the man is 
superseded by the whole strength of the Holy Ghost. 

The knowledge with which the Holy Ghost fills men 
is a continuous revelation or unfolding to us of the 
facts and laws of God and nature. God having entered 
into our personality in a sense different from that in 
which we speak of Him as being in all things, or even 
in the wisest of men prior to Pentecost, gradually as- 
sumes a larger and larger portion of our being, and 
crowds out the Disintegrator. He makes us feel more 
strongly and see more clearly that what He wishes us 
to do tends to preserve the integrity of the individual 
and the unity of society. 

True God-likeness gradually comes upon us, because 
the God in us is the same God that is in Heaven; and as 
He assumes a wider and wider place in our personality, 
those around us can see in us more of His attributes. 
This gradual growth in the power to manifest the attri- 
butes of God must be a characteristic of all in whom 
the Holy Ghost works, and will end only when w T e know 
Him fully in Heaven. 

As one grows in consciousness of the Divine in-dwell- 
ing, there comes upon him greater fear of offending 
God who seems so near and so important to him. Holy 
fear grows upon him and restrains him from setting his 
will against God's until finally the will of the finite shall 
have grown to be identical with the will of the Infinite 
and shall be obedient to it, and God shall be all in all. 

The twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost show that His 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

work is one of integration. Love is, of course, but a 
general name for the principle by which God draws to- 
gether all things, whether that principle be chemical 
affinity, molecular cohesion, or gravitation in the natural 
sphere; or beauty, goodness, and truth in the human 
sphere. Joy is a well of contentment and satisfaction 
that continuously springs forth in the soul that is at 
one with God and humanity. The martyrs had it when 
most unhappy, i. e., when suffering their horrible deaths; 
so that it does not depend upon outward circumstances, 
but upon the approving voice of God within. It is God, 
in me, pleased with that part of Himself which I call 
myself, because His will is being obeyed and His great 
designs forwarded; and this joy appears to be given 
partly as a reward for past obedience and partly as an 
incentive to further duty. Faith is the faculty by which 
God enables us to apprehend and rely upon Him as 
present in us, in Heaven, and in all things; and by which 
we are gradually perceiving that He is drawing all things 
to Himself. By faith, which He implants in us as a 
fruit of His Holy Spirit, He holds us steadfast ; not as 
self-reliant, but as strong only when united with Him. 
Modesty, temperance, and chastity are virtues that 
preserve the individual, the family, and the race, from 
disease and disintegration. Meekness, gentleness, 
peace, long-suffering, and patience are, obviously, the 
characteristics that, in a way unknown until Pentecost, 
are bringing about universal unity. Goodness, as a 
general term, means a tendency to unity; for this tend- 
ency is a quality of all good actions, and appears to 
us to be the most conceivable Jinality. 



151 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY 
OF THE ORGANIZATION AND AIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
CHURCH. 

Viewed from our hypothesis that the love in God is the 
originator of all things, and the explanation of all prog- 
ress, it is more probable, antecedently, that He who loves 
unity and abhors disintegration would establish on the 
earth one Catholic and Apostolic Church, than that He 
would establish a multitude of sects warring amongst 
themselves in His name. The evil of schism, like all 
other evils, must be the work of the Disintegrator, 
allowed by God to thwart Him, temporarily, in order 
that the Divine final victory of unity over diversity may 
be all the more glorious. To say that the Holy Catholic 
Church is an invisible company of true believers, in all 
churches throughout the world, irrespective of their 
modes of organization and worship, and that member- 
ship therein is constituted by a mere subjective act of 
faith, is like saying that all men are Freemasons if they 
are charitable, since charity is one of the objects of that 
body; and that one does not need to be initiated or to 
conform to the laws of the Freemasons, but merely to be 
in sympathy with their main object, in order to consider 
himself a full member. God, who does all His mighty 
works by order and system, would not be likely to leave 
to unorganized chancework the great labor of sanctify* 

152 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

ing mankind and bringing about the reign of perfect 
unity on the earth. The basis of organization is what 
we might have expected it priori from our hypothesis. 
Baptism, which is the rite of initiation or incorporation 
into the Church, is a uniting function. By it a man 
becomes buried in Christ. The Personality of Christ 
becomes mingled with his. He is in Christ, and Christ 
in him. All who have been baptized have thus a spir- 
itual germ-principle implanted in them, the working of 
which will tend to fill them with the same mind, the 
same feelings, namely, the mind and feelings of the 
Christ, — a personality which is common to them all. 
This growth into unity with Christ may be checked 
by the refusal of the baptized person to yield to the voice 
of the Holy Ghost. Hence we see so many cases where 
no good effects of baptism are evident. This does not 
disprove the unifying tendency of baptism, but only that 
the tendency is checked by the perverseness of the indi- 
vidual, which may, let us hope, be overcome in the inter- 
mediate state ; for very few, if any, leave this earth fitted 
for a Heavenly inheritance. St. Paul says: "For as 
many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put 
on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is 
neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; 
for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." — Gal. Ill: 27, 28. 
Most people do not take these words literally, and in- 
terpret them to mean that in the plan of salvation none 
of these distinctions will be made, and that all are equal 
in the sight of God. But if this were all that St. Paul 
intended to convey, why should he use such strong and 
positive language to affirm so simple a fact ; or why should 



153 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION 

he affirm this as a mystical effect of baptism? On the 

other hand i: ::as be taken literally Q] be 

found to be sound philosophically and possible scien- 
tifically. Further, we wfll find that since the time of 
St Paul great strides have been taken in the direction 
of their literal fulfilment, and that there is a noticeable 
tendency thereto everywhere around us in the present 
day, The philosophical :es:s :: the theory consists in 
the substitution : s personality for ours. The 

(elation ;: my personality to God's is one that cannot 
be understood. I feel sure that I exist as a person 
distinct from my Great::, and that I am free to govern 
myself. Otitis: I think, therefore I believe that I have 
a soul which thinks. Because I choose between objects, 
therefore I believe that I have a will which chooses. 
Because I have feelings and tar -eats, which I can re- 
member, I believe that there is a a ego that is distinct 
frtaa these feelings and thoughts, and that :c::gn:r.e« 
them as its own. Yet I cannot logically prove that I 
have a seal that thtaas. a will that :a::sts. an ego 
that feels. These are assumptions I cannot avoid 
making, aai doubtless there is reality at the back 
of them: yet n\y thoughts may be influenced and sug- 
gested by God, my will may be considerably, if not alto- 
gether, determined by His. and my feelings of pleasure 
or pain may be directly caused by Him. In any act of 
thought I cannot tell how much of God's personality 
there is and how much of my own. In any act of will I 
cannot tell how far I aaa tree, or how far I am governed 
by God. I can understand the origin of a thought sug- 
gested by the sight of an external object, but of thoughts 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

that arise internally I cannot always tell which are my 
own and which are God's, or the DeviPs. It is quite 
conceivable that, since the Day of Pentecost, a change 
has taken place in the proportion between the number 
of Divinely inspired thoughts and those of human 
or cerebral origin, and in their relative strength, es- 
pecially in the case of individuals destined to exercise 
such an influence on mankind as the Apostles and their 
successors have done. It is also reasonable to assert that 
the proportion of Divinely suggested thoughts has been 
increasing, and that it will increase until the Christ-Per- 
sonality, in each member of the Catholic Church, has 
driven out the discordant elements of the individual 
personality altogether, and God will be all in all. This 
is the mystical union of Christ and His Bride the Church. 
The union will not be complete till all the members of 
the Catholic Church are literally one in spirit, soul, and, 
perhaps, in body also. This teaching is corroborated by 
actual facts. The differences between races and individ- 
uals are rapidly being annihilated. Our own century has 
seen the most remote parts of the world opened to easy 
communication, and a free interchange of manners and 
customs between nations as unlike as the English and 
Japanese.. All nations are becoming acquainted, and, 
though the reign of universal amity may be a long way 
off, we see the foundations of it being surely laid through 
the spread of the Christian civilizing spirit. The first 
part of St. Paul's statement has been almost carried out; 
and already we might say that, comparatively speaking, 
throughout the world there is no longer bondage, and 
that what little slavery there is left is rapidly being 

155 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

stamped out by the power of Christian nations. The 
high are being surely lowered, and the lower classes 
raised. The weak are conquering the strong, and the 
Kingdom of Meekness is being everywhere established, 
and, no matter how often set back, it must in time be 
triumphant over all that keeps nation from nation, and 
man from man. There must be in time one language 
and one religion. Communism, which in the present 
state of society is impracticable, will be universal, 
when the Catholic Church has completely embraced 
the world extensively and intensively. All men will be 
filled with only one mind and one Spirit, the mind and 
spirit of Jesus Christ; and, just as my mind governs 
the millions of living corpuscles that I call, collectively, 
my body, so will the mind of Christ actuate and move 
airthe members of His Bodv, the Catholic or universal 
Church. 

This process of unification is continued not only by 
the uniting^germ of Spirit ~ life implanted in baptism 
but also by the Sacrament of the One Body and Blood, 
which is the central and essential feature of the worship 
of the Catholic Church. Not only shall there be one 
Spirit actuating the members of the Catholic Church, 
and gradually making them think, speak, and feel alike, 
but there shall also be imparted, through the material 
elements of bread and wine, one body and one blood. 

As a uniting function, tending to bring about absolute 
unity on this planet, the Sacrament of Holy Commun- 
ion far transcends all other agencies used by God for 
the same purpose, illustrates them all, and completely 
reveals God's purpose; and at the same time furnishes 

? " 156 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

the means to bring it to pass. The Spirit of God 
seems to be working powerfully as a leveller and as- 
similator in the Methodist and Presbyterian and 
other sectarian bodies; but this also rather confirms 
our argument; for these bodies, having come out from 
the Catholic Church, and most of them maintaining the 
sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper, probably 
have retained, and transmit by personal contact, much 
of the x\postolic grace. The mysterious unifying and 
vitalizing power that descends through the Catholic 
Church has spread itself beyond her limits like a halo. 
Nearly all who call themselves Christians must fre- 
quently have touched persons who possessed the new 
life-principle. As a matter of fact many of the Moham- 
medans and Buddhists, who have come in contact with 
Europeans, may have received the new affinity; and 
ninety-nine out of every hundred sectarians would 
probably have it, but only those branches of the Catholic 
Church that have maintained the Historic Episcopate 
can be sure that they have it, since they alone have pre- 
served the mechanism that Our Lord designed to re- 
tain and dispense it. The others may have Apostolic suc- 
cession, but certainly have no way of being sure of it, 
and no proper system to guarantee its descent, unim- 
paired, to their successors. Many of them are beginning 
to realize this, and it appears only a question of time 
when all will accept unity in the Catholic Church. 

To amplify St. Paul's illustration, the Holy Catholic 
Church is like a building — we might say a large Cathe- 
dral — built upon the foundation of the Apostles, and 
prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner 



157 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

stone into which the whole building is framed, all the 
pillars of the crypt leading up to or supporting the great 
unifying stone, and all the foundation and structure 
above ground resting upon it. The Crypt is the Old 
Testament substructure. Abraham, Moses, David and 
the Prophets are some of the largest pillars that lead up 
to and support the foundation stone; and St. Peter, St. 
James, St. John, and St. Paul are some of the largest 
stones in the foundation above ground. The nave is the 
Roman Church, and the Greek and Anglican Com- 
munions are the transepts. As we look closely at the 
walls, we observe that the stones are alive. Not far 
above the foundation we recognize Clement and Origen, 
Ignatius and Polycarp ; while higher up the wall, we 
recognizeTertullian, and the great Augustine ; and a host 
of saints, Bishops, Priests, Deacons, and laymen. The 
building proceeds from the bottom upward, and the 
roof is not yet on. It will not be completed until Christ 
shall come to be the keystone of the topmost arch; even 
as, in His first coming, He was the headstone of the 
corner. The stones are not equally large, or strong, or 
handsome. Some are even ugly and rotten. The 
Building in its entirety is beautiful ; yet the materials of 
which it is composed are both good and bad. Some 
there are who insist that the Holy Catholic Church 
comprises only those whose hearts are united truly in 
Christ, and thus attain a certain standard of Holiness. 
If they are sufficiently holy, they are supposed to be 
members of the Catholic or Universal Church, even if 
they have never been baptized or communicated. The 
true view is that all who have been baptized, whether 

158 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

good or bad, are built into this cathedral. Some are 
weak, and not only corrupt themselves but are apt to 
defile those around them ; yet none of these is sufficient 
to endanger the safety of the building, or to mar its 
beauty as a whole. Around the nave and transepts are 
irregular chapels, many of them being of odd and whim- 
sical design. These are the Christian sects. They are 
more or less closely connected with the unifying corner 
stone, and, when the roof is on it will cover them all. 



159 



CHAPTER X. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OP INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY 01 

THE COMMUNION OP SAINTS AND THE REMISSION OF 
SINS BY THE UNIVERSAL INTEGRATOR. 

In the old covenant, sins were remitted by the sacrifice 
of the blood of animals. In the new covenant, they are 
remitted by the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the 
Lamb of God, which do now take away the sins of^the 
world, and must continue to be offered up in His 
Church for the remission of sins, until He shall come 
again. 

In each case the visible act of offering the sacrifice 
effects its purpose in two ways: Subjectively, by in- 
tensifying the faith of the recipient, and working omhis 
feelings so as to induce him to live a better Life; 
objectively, by instilling into him a new influence, which 
works upon the substance of his being and develops the 
Divinity within him. 

Let us notice now, particularly, the details in the 
offering of sacrifice under both covenants: 

(i) Under the old covenant, no one must presume to 
offer sacrifices except the members of a chosen priest- 
hood. "The Lord said unto Aaron: Therefore thou 
and thy sons with thee shall keep your priest's office for 
evemhing of the altar, and within the veil ; and ye shall 
serve: I have given your priest's office unto you as a 
service of gift : and the stranger that cometh nigh shall 

1 6c 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

be put to death." Numbers xvm: 7, We know how 
Korah, Dathan, and Abiram suffered in attempting to 
usurp this function. 

In the new covenant, none can offer the sacrifice of the 
Body and Blood of Christ but a priest duly ordained 
to the office by the Apostles or their successors. Even 
a deacon cannot do so. 

(2) The priest, in offering the sacrifice under the old 
covenant, must wear the kind of vestments God wished 
him to wear, and no other. It was not a matter of in- 
difference, a non-essential, a question of taste: "And 
thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, 
for glory, and for beauty." "And they shall take gold, 
and blue, and purple and scarlet and fine linen." Ex- 
odus xxvTii., 2, 5, etc. 

Under the new covenant, the Church adapted these 
colors and these vestments, and used them on her 
sacrificing priesthood for over a thousand years, till 
undiscerning reformers abolished them for a plain 
white surplice. 

(3) In the old covenant, the structure and materials 
of the tabernacle and its furnishings were minutely 
described by God after a Heavenly pattern. Nothing 
was left to individual taste and judgment. Every man 
did not think he had a right to worship God in the way 
he pleased; and that every other man that worshipped 
differently was ignorant, or worse. God gave to Moses 
the best way "for glory and for beauty", modelled after 
the worship of God as it is carried on in Heaven. 

The division into the court of the people, the Holy 
Place and the Holy of Holies; the form and materials 

161 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

of the Ark of the Covenant ; the incense ; the candlesticks ; 
the laver, and the shewbread, all these were described 
in detail as God wished them to be made and 
used. 

In the new covenant, the church followed the taber- 
nacle divisions in the nave, choir, and sanctuary. The 
altar, incense, candlesticks, laver, and shewbread were 
gradually adapted as the Holy Ghost guided the Church 
into all the truth of the relation between the covenants. 
The only changes were those rendered necessary by 
the substitution of the sacrifice of the Body and Blood 
of Christ for the bodies and blood of bulls and goats. 

These things are no more matters of taste than the 
acceptance of the Bible, as a revelation from God, is a 
matter of taste. 

Imagine, if you can, a section of people, under the old 
covenant, rising up in rebellion and saying that they 
objected to the shape of the Ark of the Covenant, or 
to the color of the priest's vestments, or to the candle- 
sticks in the Tabernacle, or to the use of incense ! 

"But," some may say, "Were not all these things 
done away with, when the veil of the Temple was rent 
in twain?" Certainly not. Christ said that He had 
not come to destroy the Law, i. e. y the Jewish system, but 
to fulfil it. These were not destroyed. They were 
fulfilled and developed, absorbed and adapted. The 
old passed away by being taken up into the new. 

The same pattern which God gave to Moses was, as a 
matter of course, followed in the main by the new cove- 
nant, because it is a pattern of things as they are, Eternal 
in the Heavens. Are we to suppose that the pattern 

162 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

was changed in Heaven because certain theologians 
on earth objected to it? 

(4) Unleavened wafer bread was one form of sacrifice 
under the old covenant. In Exodus xxix: 2, we 
read: "And unleavened bread, and cakes unleavened 
tempered with oil, and wafers unleavened annointed 
with oil, of wheaten flour shalt thou make them." 

Under the new covenant, unleavened bread was taken 
by our Lord in instituting the sacrifice of His Body and 
Blood; and it was used for over one thousand years, until 
the reformers, in defiance of Scripture and ecclesiastical 
authority, declared that bread containing leaven, or 
yeast, which is the principle of fermentation and 
corruption, was sufficient. 

Now leavened bread may be good enough for com- 
mon use, but surely the finest kind of bread, and 
freest from fermenting germs, the very cleanest and 
purest should be used for consecration into the Body 
of our Lord. St. Paul says: "The bread which we 
break is it not the communion of the body of Christ? 
For we, being many are one bread and one body, for we 
are all partakers of that one bread." I. Cor. x. 16 and 17. 

(5) Under both covenants, there could be no remission 
of sins without the shedding of blood. St. Paul says: 
"And almost all things are by the law purged with blood, 
and without shedding of blood is no remission." Heb. 
ix. 22. 

In the new covenant, we have the warning of our Lord 
Himself: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat 
the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have 
no life in you." John vi. 53. 

163 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

The transfusion of J)lood has been practised for cen- 
turies amongst Oriental nations as a visible bond of 
unity. When two men vowed eternal friendship, each 
opened a vein and inserted some of the other's blood 
in token that henceforth they were one. 

If eating the bread, as St. Paul describes it, makes us 
one body, drinking the blood of Christ must also make 
us of one body. " For the life of the flesh is in the blood ; 
and I have given it to you upon the Altar to make an 
atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh 
an atonement for the soul." Lev. xvn: n. 

(6) In both covenants, the blood was mixed with 
water. In Heb. ix: 19, we read: "He took the blood 
of calves and of goats, with water." 

Our Lord on the cross shed out of His side both blood 
and water. 

"This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus 
Christ, not by water only, but by water and blood." 
1 John v: 6. 

The Christian Church has, consequently, followed 
the practice of mixing water and wine on the 
altar. 

(7) In both covenants the sacrifice was accompanied 
by a service and the reading of Scripture. "For when 
Moses had spoken every precept to all the people, ac- 
cording to the Law, he took the blood of calves and 
of goats." Heb. ix : 19. 

In the Liturgies of the new covenant we have prayers 
and the reading of the Old Testament Commandments 
and the Epistles and Gospels. 

(8) In both covenants, the priest was required to 

164 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

4 

make a strong, clear statement to the, people that^ this 

was the blood of a covenant. ^ , 

&&We read in Heb. ix: 20, that when Moses had pre- 
pared the sacrifice he was required to say: "This^is the 
blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto 
you." 

The priest in the Christian Church must use the 
strong language of institution, saying : " This is my blood 
of the new testament which is shed for you, and for many, 
for the remission of sins." 

Again, when he holds up the chalice, he must say: 
"The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed 
for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life." 

(9) In both covenants, the priest was compelled to 
lay his hands upon the material elements of the sacri- 
fice. Whatever mysterious spiritual force might have 
come to each priest by the laying on of his ordainer's 
hands, he was supposed to transmit to the elements. 
What this unseen principle is we cannot, of course, tell. 
It may be a change in the affinities of atoms, or the 
whirling of molecules, or a power akin to what we know 
as animal magnetism; or it may be something entirely 
beyond our conception; but what we do know positively 
is that, whatever it was and is, the priest was bound to 
convey it by actually touching the sacrifice with his 
hands, and that this was the same in both covenants. 

In Exod. xxrx: 15, we read: "And Aaron and his 
sons shall put their hands upon the head of the ram;" and 
in the tenth verse: "And Aaron and his sons shall put 
their hands upon the head of the bullock." Again in 
the twenty-fourth verse, speaking of the loaf of bread 

165 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and one wafer out of the basket of unleavened bread, 
that was before the Lord: "And thou shalt put all in 
the hands of Aaron and in the hands of his sons, and 
shalt wave them for a wave offering before the Lord.'' 
Therefore no matter whether it was a bullock or ram 
whose blood was to be offered, or a wafer of unleavened 
bread, Aaron and his sons must lay their hands on it. 

So, in the new covenant by the rubrics in the conse- 
cration prayer, the priest is expressly enjoined to do the 
same. He is told to lay his hand upon all the bread. 
When he consecrates the wine, he is to take the cup 
into his hand and he is to lay his hand upon every vessel 
in which there is any wine to be consecrated. 

Now if the object is merely to call attention to the 
elements consecrated, why must he actually touch all 
the bread and all the vessels ? His lips also must touch 
the wine before it is given to the people. 

(10) In both covenants, the blood of the sacrifice must 
come into physical contact with the persons whose sins 
were to be remitted: "For when Moses had spoken 
even' precept to all the people, according to the Law, 
he took the blood of calves and goats with water, and 
scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled both the bool 
and all the people." — Heb. ix : 19. All the people must 
be sprinkled. 

In the new covenant, the contact is closer still, for 
they do verily eat and drink the Body and Blood and 
take the same into their bodies, so that Christ thereby 
dwells in them and they in Him. Therefore we see that 
this mysterious unseen spiritual force comes to the priest 
by succession of personal, Apostolic, laying-on of hands; 

166 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

that it is transmitted to the elements of bread and wine, 
through the laying-on of his hands; and that, with the 
act of digestion and assimilation, it passes into the blood 
of the recipient, and from his blood, which is the life of 
his flesh, it enters the substance of his being, thereby 
preserving his body and soul unto everlasting life. 

(12) And lastly, in both covenants, according to St. 
Paul, faith was one of the conditions necessary for the 
successful working of this mysterious influence. But we 
must not confuse the efficient cause of a thing with a 
mere condition necessary to it. For instance, a plant 
will not grow without moisture. People, in loose and 
unphilosophical language, may say that moisture causes 
the plant to grow; but this is not the case. God causes 
the plant to grow by a power exercised through the un- 
seen world. This power we know as chemical affinity 
and molecular cohesion; but one of the conditions on 
which alone it seems to work is that there be moisture 
around the plant. Without moisture God does not, 
apparently, in the ordinary course of His working, make 
the plant grow. 

What moisture is to the plant, faith is to the sacra- 
ments. The faith is not the cause of the efficacy of the 
mysterious power; much less must it be supposed to be 
the power itself. The unseen grace comes from God; 
but it will not, apparently, act unless we have faith, 
any more than the plant will grow, unless it have 
moisture. 

And this faith is a belief ; not in God, generally, or in 
religion, or in the Bible, but a belief that these conse- 
crated elements are the Body and Blood of our Lord, 

167 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

and that they are given for the remission of the sins of 
the person that eats and drinks of them, and that the 
remission shall come from the visible act of receiving 
them. 

Unless a man believes this, he implies that our Lord 
said what was not true when He said: "This is my 
body, " and: "This is my blood." Also that the priest 
says {what is not true when he says: "The Body of 
our Lord, Jesus Christ, which was given for thee — and 
the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for 
thee, — preserve thv bodv and soul unto everlasting 
life." 

Such persons, of course, only increase their own con- 
demnation, not discerning our Lord's Body and Blood. 

This mysterious cleansing and remitting power cannot 
act in the souls of such persons; but, nevertheless, the 
power is'there, ready to act the moment they have faith, 
just as the power is ready to make the plant grow, the 
moment it gets moisture. 

One may still be in doubt and say that we cannot 
see how bread and wine could effect our conscience, ex- 
cept as memorials to increase our faith; but, if so, let 
us ponder these things deeply, and then ask this ques- 
tion urged by St. Paul. Ask it over and over again until 
its full significance takes possession of us: "For if the 
blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of an heifer, 
sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of 
the flesh; how much more shall the blood of Christ, 
who through the Erernal Spirit, offered Himself without 
spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works 
to serve the living God." — Heb. ix: 13 and 14. 

108 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Man cannot think, unless the nerve centres of his brain 
are replenished by material atoms of food through the 
blood. Does not meat make dogs vicious? And oats 
make horses lively ? Do not material things affect our 
thoughts ? Whiskey, opium, chloral, cocaine, and other 
drugs powerfully influence the mind. Why should 
not consecrated bread and wine be made by the Creator 
the means whereby He can telepath us in an especial 
way for our good ? 



169 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OP INTEGRATION AS EXPLANATORY 
OP THE FINAL DESTINY OF MAN. 

(i) On examining the parts of any organized body 
with the microscope, we find that what appear to our 
naked eyes to be fibres and tubes are really made up of 
minute cells; that each of these cells contains a small 
spot called a nucleus, which in its turn contains a still 
smaller corpuscle called the nucleolus. 

(2) We observe that, in order to propagate itself, a cell 
needs the co-operation, either of a blastema or germ sub- 
stance, or of another cell. There must be a union of 
male and female elements. 

(3) We can give no rational account of any material 
cause sufficient to start motion in the cell from a chem- 
ical examination of its protoplasmic or other contents. 

(4) We are obliged to fall back upon the idea of a 
Spiritual power imparting life and motion to the cells 
by regulating what we call their chemical, or molecular, 
affinities. In other words, the life of protoplasm is the 
life of God, partly inherent, partly transmitted from 
Heaven. 

Let us see if this throws any light upon the subject 
of the Resurrection of the human body. 

The germ theory of the Resurrection is first set 
forth by St. Paul in the Fifteenth Chapter of his 
first Epistle to the Corinthians, He says, begin- 
ning at verse 35: "But some man will say, How 



170 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

are the dead raised up and with what body do they 
come? Thou fool, that which thou so west is not 
quickened, except it die: and that which thou so west, 
thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, 
it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But 
God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every 
seed his own body." 

Of a grain of wheat we observe: 

(i) It is a living germ containing its nucleus and 
mucleolus. 

(2) It contains its female ovule and its male pollen. 

(3) When placed under suitable conditions of air, 
warmth, and moisture, God will give it a body. 

(4) Each seed is given a body distinctly its own by 
virtue of a formula of assimilation different from all 
others. It may absorb the same elements as other 
grains and, perhaps, the same as other individuals of 
the wheat kind, but its mode of appropriating them 
to its use is peculiarly its own. Of ten millions of stalks 
and heads of grain in a wheat field, accordingly, no two 
are precisely alike. 

The following fair inferences appear to us to be im- 
plied in St. Paul's statement: 

(1) There may be contained in the body of a man, 
destined to be raised up at the last day, a nucleus, or life 
germ of the Resurrection-body. 

(2) If we are to follow out the analogy of all other 
vitalized germs, this nucleus or life germ of the Resurrec- 
tion-body will require a co-operating element of blas- 
tema or germ life, to fertilize it, fructify it, and keep it 
alive 



171 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(3) Just as the grain of wheat lies in the ground 
dormant until its surroundings are exactly suited to its 
growth, so must the germ of the Resurrection-body await 
the great Spring time of the last day. As God has pro- 
vided for different kinds of seeds, shells, pods, rinds, and 
other coverings to protect the germ of life within, so we 
should expect Him to provide suitable protection to 
the germ of the Resurrection-body, to keep it unto that 
day. We know that no particle of the human body can 
cease to exist; and this germ might be so adequately pro- 
tected that even cremation would not impair its vitality. 

(4) As God gives to each seed a body distinct from 
all others in having a unique formula of assimilation, 
so He gives to each human body characteristics pecu- 
liarly its own. I may eat the same food as my neighbor, 
breathe the same air and absorb the same fluids, and yet 
we assimilate them so differently that his body is tall, 
mine short; his complexion is dark, mine light. The 
same elements of oxygen, carbon, and what not, which in 
his case produce obesity in mine produce fragility. It 
is not necessary to believe that in the Resurrection our 
glorified bodies will be composed of the same particles 
that our earthly bodies had; but only that there will 
survive a nucleus, or germ, that will have the same 
formula of assimilation that the old body had. Much 
of the popular doubt on the subject of the Resurrec- 
tion is due to ignorance on this point. It is, of course, 
a physical impossibility that the same particles could 
be used because they may have been absorbed by more 
than one human body on the earth; and besides, the 
bodyVhich a man has in his eightieth year, for exam- 



172 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

pie, has been entirely changed at least a score of times, 
and he has had certainly as many as twenty distinct 
bodies since he was a child. Yet, since the formula of 
assimilation has always remained the same, or nearly so, 
heisable to recognize the body of his old age as identical, 
though so often renewed in its actual particles, with 
that which he had in his youth. The body that I shall 
have in the Resurrection will be the same body that I 
have now, just as the body I have now is the same I had 
ten years ago. 

If we accept this view, the question at once suggests 
itself: Is this germ, or nucleus of the Resurrection-body, 
in every man at his birth, or is it a special gift imparted 
to him at some time afterwards ? 
H&The rubric at the beginning of the Burial service says: 
"Here it is to be noted that the office ensuing is not to 
be used for any that die unbaptized, or excommunicate, 
or have laid violent hands upon themselves." 

The Anglican committal service reads as follows: 
"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His 
great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear 
brother here departed, we therefore commit his body 
to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to 
dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to 
eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall 
change our vile body, that it may be like unto His glo- 
rious body, according to the mighty working, whereby 
he is able to subdue all things ? to Himself.' ' 

The refusal to allow these words to be said over the 
body of one dying unbaptized certainly implies that 
the Church holds out no "sure and certain hope" of a 



173 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

resurrection " through our Lord Jesus Christ" in the 
case of one that has not received baptism. If there is 
such a thing as a nucleus or life germ of the Resurrection- 
body, therefore, we are, apparently, not born with it, but 
it must be imparted to us after birth; and one way of re- 
ceiving it is through baptism. 

If we examine our Lord's conversation with Nico- 
demus, we will find that it strongly corroborates this 
view. In the third chapter of St. John's Gospel we read 
in the fifth verse: Jesus answered "Verily, verily, I say 
unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, 
he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God". 

The phrase "Kingdom of God" cannot here be con- 
sidered to refer only to the elect on the earth; but is 
manifestly a reference also to the abode of the blessed 
dead after the Judgment. Therefore we may fairly take 
this utterance as involving these truths: 

(i) Knowing that water is composed of living organ- 
isms that, in their ultimate structure are cellular and 
germinal, and that its minute atoms depend for their 
energy upon a spiritual force, we infer that the "Water 
and the Spirit" together impart to the tissues of the 
person baptized a new vitality and, perhaps, new affini- 
ties throughout. 

(2) This imparted life-principle is spoken of as a 
"new birth". 

The unbaptized body has been developed from its 
mother's womb to the time of baptism by absorbing, ac- 
cording to its own formula of assimilation, the elements 
that surround it. Now there is born in it a new power 
of assimilation. There is implanted the germ of a new 
body. 

174 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

(3) Unless a man have received into his body this 
germ of the new life, he shall not be allowed to enter the 
Resurrected Kingdom. 

If the analogy of all other seed fertilization is to be 
carried out in the case of this germ of the Resurrection- 
body, implanted by baptism, we should expect provision 
in the plan of salvation for supplying the co-operating 
germ force of the opposite sex necessary to fertilize the 
baptismal germ and preserve its vitality by continuous 
nourishing application. This we find in the Sacrament 
of the Body and Blood of Christ. That the Church 
regards the consecrated elements as having some 
mysterious power to nourish or fertilize the nucleus of a 
Resurrection-body is a fair inference from the words used 
by the Priest in administering it: "The Body of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, preserve thy body and soul unto ever- 
lasting life." 

St. Augustine was of opinion that the grace conveyed 
by the consecrated bread and wine was the same 
as that given through the material elements of the 
baptismal water; and this was the opinion of the Church 
until the rise of the theory of transubstantiation in the 
ninth and tenth centuries. Luther held the same view 
as St. Augustine. Antecedently we should expect that the 
mysterious influence conveyed by the two sacraments 
would be correlative, each necessary to the perfect 
fructification of the other. If the grace conveyed by 
each had been precisely the same as that conveyed by the 
other, there would not be any need for two. Either one 
would have been enough. 

We must take our stand on "Hoc est meum corpus". 



175 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

Luther chalked these words on the table during his 
conference with Zwingle, because he was too profound 
a mystic not to perceive therein the atomic identification 
of Christ and the believer; and too logical not to see that 
this is the only straightforward interpretation we can 
put upon the words of institution and the Sixth Chapter 
of St. John's Gospel. When our Lord said to his 
followers, ''This is my body," He could not have meant 
that the bread He held in His hands was a part 
of the body, which, they could plainly see, was complete 
without it. This apparent contradiction has always 
appeared one of the most difficult features in the great 
mystery. The germ theory, however, throws consider- 
able light upon it, and makes Luther's belief, i. e., that 
of consubstanuation, highly intelligible. Our Lord 
was not speaking to scientists when He instituted the 
sacrament. Consequently He did not give a scientific 
explanation of it, but merely stated the fact in positive, 
unambiguous, and terse language. According to this 
theory-, had He wished to do so. He might probably have 
explained His meaning thus: "This body is not com- 
posed of the same particles as the body that I had a 
fewvears aep, and vet it is called the same bodv. My 
real body, for its identity, does not depend upon the 
particular atoms of flesh composing it at any one time, 
but rather on a peculiar arnnity of those atoms for 
other atoms outside of myself. The flesh profiteth 
nothing. It is the Spirit that quickeneth. That which 
really constitutes my body is the peculiar formula of 
assimilation that, under Spiritual guidance, the atoms 
of my body have, and have differently from those of 

176 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

any other man's body. This bread that I have just 
blessed has received, from the touch of my hand in 
breaking it, a new spiritual influence upon its atoms 
whereby their affinities are changed, and they possess the 
same formula of assimilation that the atoms of my famil- 
iar, personal, body have. This bread has really, there- 
fore, become my body; and it will have the power, act- 
ing with the atomic afhnity received through baptism, to 
implant in the body of everyone receiving it the same 
formula of assimilation that my body possesses. In 
other words, I will be in him and he in me. Not that 
the atoms are no longer bread. They are still atoms of 
bread; but, whereas there was, before its consecration, in 
it only the substance of bread, now there are in it two 
substances, that of bread and that of my body. This 
Spiritual power, of changing the atomic affinity of bread 
and wine by the laying-on of hands, I shall transmit 
through you to your successors, upon whom, to transmit 
it, you must lay your hands in turn ; and this tactual suc- 
cession shall be the physical framework of my Church, 
which is to be the continuation of my incarnation." 

As to the connection between the germ or life 
principle, implanted in a human body by this sacra- 
ment and the Resurrection, our Lord uses in the 
Sixth Chapter of St. John's Gospel, verses 51, 52 
and 53, the plainest and the strongest language: "I 
am the living bread which came down from Heaven: 
if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and 
the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give 
for J;he life of the world." The Jews therefore strove 
among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us 



177 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

his flesh to eat ?" Then Jesus said unto them : "Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son 
of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. 
Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath 
eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day." 

This germ theory is strongly corroborated by the 
stringent regulations which God imposed upon the Jews 
regarding leaven. 

Even' thoughtful clergyman who stands up at his 
lectern to read the Twelfth Chapter of Exodus, on 
Easter Morning, must conclude that there is an impor- 
tant connection between the subject of leaven and that of 
the Resurrection. Beginning with the 15th verse we read : 

''Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the 
first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: 
for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day 
until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from 
Israel. And in the first day there shall be an holy con- 
vocation, and in the seventh day there shall be an holy 
convocation to you; no manner of work shall be done in 
them, save that which even- man must eat, that only 
may be done of you. And ye shall observe the feast of 
unleavened bread ; for in this self-same day have I brought 
your armies out of the land of Egypt : therefore shall ye 
observe this day in your generations by an ordinance 
for ever. In the first month, on the fourteenth day of 
the month at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until 
the one and twentieth day of the month at even. Seven 
days shall there be no leaven found in your houses ; for 
whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul 
shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether 

178 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

he be a stranger, or born in the land. Ye shall eat 
nothing leavened ; in all your habitations shall ye eat un- 
leavened bread." 

The following points in connection with the above 
quotation indicate that God considered the absence of 
leaven a fact of vital importance in the economy of His 
plan of salvation : 

(i) The stern, commanding, tone of the language 
used. 

(2) The quotation begins and ends with an express 
injunction, positive, and unambiguous. 

(3) The reiteration indicates an emphatic intention. 

(4) The prohibitory injunction is to include strangers 
with the Jews lest any spores of leaven should be 
communicated by contagion. 

(5) During the time specified, the prohibition extends 
to all their habitations, lest those departing to a distant 
place might consider themselves at liberty to use it, 
and unwittingly bring it back with them in their cloth- 
ing or other belongings. 

(6) Not only was leavened bread forbidden, but any 
other food which contained leaven. 

(7) They were to make a careful search in their 
houses, so that not a single particle of the forbidden 
substance should by any chance escape detection. 

(8) Above all, the severity of the sentence to be exe- 
cuted upon any who broke this law indicates that God 
considered this a matter of vital importance. 

(9) Were all these precautions taken merely to com- 
memorate the fact that the Israelites left Egypt so hur- 
riedly that they could not wait for their bread to rise ? 



179 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

We, who believe that all history centers in the person of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, regard even* part of the Old 
Testament as fully intelligible only in its relation to 
Christ. All the injunctions with regard to the observ- 
ance of the Jewish Passover assume an important signifi- 
cance in the light of their connection with the institu- 
tion of the sacrament of His Body and Blood, which 
our Lord inaugurated on the evening of His last Pass- 
over Feast. In this light it is obvious that God laid such 
stringent regulations upon the Jews regarding leaven in 
order that, when our Lord instituted His sacrament, un- 
leavened bread should be used, and that the bread of 
which he said, '"'This is my Body,'" should not contain 
the sporadic action of yeast. The inference from this 
is unavoidable. We must infer that there is something 
about the atomic action of the spores of leaven that 
hinders the due fertilization of the baptismal ovule by 
the sacramental pollen, contained in the consecrated 
elements of bread and wine. Of course, God, being All- 
powerful, could, and doubtless does, bring about the 
desired change in the atomic affinities of leavened bread 
in spite of the hostile sporadic action of leaven; but we 
observe that He always works in accordance with natural 
laws ; and the pains, which He has taken to impress upon 
us the necessity for the use of unleavened bread imply : 
that He wishes His mode of imparting and nourishing 
the germ of the Resurrection-body to be in accordance 
with the regular action of spores and germs; that He 
wishes His instructions to be followed to the very letter, 
and that, if any individual, or religious body, in defiance 
of Scripture, and merely to be opposite to the custom 

180 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

of any other religious r body, shall^use leavened bread in 
the sacrament, the life germ of the Resurrection-body 
may thereby have its vitality seriously impaired. 

Everything that is will last forever, in some form. It 
may not be always as it is now; but it will last in its 
present shape as long as it suits God's purposes, and 
then it will persist in whatever form God desires it to 
put on, or allows it to choose. Nothing that has existed 
can cease to exist. The conservation of force is as true 
as that of matter. God is in all things, and God is life ; 
therefore, there is life in all things. God is Everlasting; 
therefore, life is everlasting. A deciduous tree sheds 
its leaves, and they seem to die; but the leaf is made up 
of millions of live atoms. These do not die. The leaves 
rot and fertilize the soil. The same tree, or some other, 
absorbs these very atoms. The universe is made up 
of units which change their combinations, but never die. 
They sometimes form aggregations that do not seem 
to us to be alive; but that is because we have not 
faculties fine enough to observe their actions. Thus, 
we divide nature into two kinds: organic, whose life is 
manifest; and inorganic, whose life is hidden, or whose 
construction is too fine to be detected. 

Death is only an alteration in the form of life. It is a 
disintegration, leading to a higher integration, to a larger 
soul, to a simpler organism. All progress in the uni- 
verse means progress towards simplicity and unity. The 
life that is in all differentiated things is everlasting. 
The forms in^ which it dwells, these alone are destroyed. 
Each highly ^differentiated form dies to give way to a 
more integrated or less complex one. The lighter a 

1S1 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

substance is, the more complex it is. The life of the 
atom of hydrogen is everlasting; but hydrogen itself 
ever dies to become something heavier and more con- 
densed. Its affinity for other substances is simply its 
yearning for a higher and more unified life. It is the 
instinctive craving of Being to be free from non-being ; 
of unity to be free from diversity; of the Infinite to be 
free from the finite. The life of man craves the life of 
God for the same reason. Man's true home is Heaven, 
not earth. The life that is his is universal. It is only 
the localized manifestation of that life that shifts. The 
life lives, recognizes itself throughout its progress, and 
will be fully conscious of itself only in Heaven. 

When we say that we believe in everlasting life for 
man, we do not mean an existence unbroken by what 
we call death, but one that goes from death to death, 
attaining at each step a higher life, until it reaches the 
height of the Source of all life. The same word 
"aionios" is used to describe both eternal life and 
eternal death. It means "age long", " from age to age", 
or, perhaps, "from stage to stage". The process runs 
from life to death, from this death to life; from this life to 
death again, from this death to life again; and so on- 
ward, stage beyond stage, until the acme of unity is 
reached. At this point life itself becomes a monotonous 
level; but God's purpose alters, and His loving impulse, 
having no other and adequate object to work upon, in 
order that it may have scope to grow (for such is 
the nature of love), allows the Disintegrator another 
temporary triumph. So onward, through the eternal 
ages, the Love of God widens and intensifies; and ever- 

182 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTEGRATION. 

lasting life is made interesting and enjoyable by the 
overcoming of ugliness, evil, and error, and by the de- 
velopment of beauty, goodness, and truth; and God's 
creatures are made happier, stage by stage, as they 
realize the beneficence that underlies their temporary 
suffering. 



THE END. 



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